DAWN PATROL: Jeff Zucker announced his new morning team. (
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CNN’s Jeff Zucker unveiled his new morning-show lineup yesterday — as his old show, “Today,” continued to reel under the weight of the ongoing Matt Lauer saga.
The timing of the announcement was no coincidence.
To make his mark in the mornings — and to take on the big boys in a highly competitive, cutthroat daypart — Zucker announced a traditional morning-show team featuring Chris Cuomo and Kate Bolduan as co-anchors and Michaela Pereira, imported from LA’s “KTLA Morning News,” as the news reader.
The still-unnamed show is scheduled to premiere “this spring,” according to CNN.
Zucker, the onetime “Today” whiz kid, is hoping to make some hay against NBC and ABC’s top-rated “Good Morning America” — and to prove that his onetime “Today” show success wasn’t a fluke.
“It looks to me like he’s going after ‘Today’ and ‘GMA,’ ” an industry insider with a long track record in morning TV told The Post after hearing about the new show’s anchor lineup.
“Zucker is an expert in morning TV and he’s tackled that right out of the box,” says the insider.
Cuomo, the former ABC News anchor/correspondent, was previously announced as one of the show’s co-anchors — so no surprise there — but Bolduan was a bit of a wild card.
“I think he’s building a traditional morning show, with a male and female co-anchor and a woman to read the news,” the insider says, alluding to “Today’s” lineup (Lauer, Savannah Guthrie and news reader Natalie Morales).
The DC-based Bolduan, who’s in her mid-30s, has co-anchored CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” since last year and is also a congressional correspondent.
An Indiana native, she’s married to Michael Gershenson — a partner in The Carlyle Group — and, before joining CNN, worked as a reporter at ABC affiliate WTVD in Raleigh-Durham, NC.
She and Gershenson haven’t been shy about sharing their private life. Last year, the couple’s $1.4 million, five-bedroom house in the tony Foxhall neighborhood, in Georgetown, was featured in Home & Design magazine (where Bolduan worked as an intern while attending George Washington University).
Zucker will rely on Bolduan and Cuomo to generate some buzz in the morning — and then try to build on top of that into daytime and prime time.
“Here’s how you go about fixing that network — you start in the morning and you end in prime-time and hopefully the twain shall meet,” says the source. “I don’t know that any one thing is going to make or break [Zucker], or how he’s going to make CNN better, but already he’s shown the network is more alive — and he’s shaken things up.”