Entertainment

Stand off

With a little more than a year to go on her contract, Katie Couric is dressing up her resumé.

The CBS anchor, now 53, is facing a huge pay cut in her unprecedented $15 million-a-year salary.

More importantly, her bosses at CBS have not yet said whether they want to keep her — at any price.

“I would be flabbergasted if she didn’t take a pay cut,” after next year, says a source close to Katie.

The network’s “Evening News” was in third place when she came over from the “Today” show in 2006 — and it has not budged.

CBS News reportedly laid off 150 people on Monday — including, for the first time, staffers at “60 Minutes.” (A spokesman for the network said the number of layoffs was “a fraction” of that but declined to say how many.)

No matter, the idea of paying Couric eight figures to anchor a news show that is in last place does not sit well in the upper echelons of CBS News, where her hiring as TV’s first female anchor is seen as a noble but failed experiment.

Couric herself tells Harper’s Bazaar in an upcoming issue that she sometimes dreams that she’s still in school and “I’m forced to take an exam about things I know nothing about.”

The exec who oversees the “Evening News,” executive vice president Paul Friedman, declined a request yesterday to talk about Couric’s future.

Perhaps coincidentally, for the first time last week, Couric’s name began to surface as the next big-time daytime host.

As luck would have it, her contract with CBS expires the same month that Oprah Winfrey plans to end her show after 25 years.

Those who know Couric well believe that she has no desire to start over again on a new show.

“Getting her to do the kind of things you have to do to make a daytime show work, I don’t see it,” says a former colleague of Katie. Larry King’s job on CNN seems a better fit, says the friend.