To weigh down Katie Couric's gravitas, CBS News is lightening its load.

Less than a week after Brian Williams' NBC team pulled a similar move for similar reasons, CBS ousted the executive producer of the Evening News with Katie Couric—who helmed the broadcast long before Couric came along—after months of a steady third place finish for the program amid criticism that the show had lost its way.

Rome Hartman, the exiled exec, joined the show back in 2005, when Bob Schieffer was manning the nightly news desk. He introduced several new features to the show, some of which remained through Couric's reign, though most of which, according to critics, should not have.

One of the changes Hartman made to the show was incorporating commentary by outside sources, something which paved the way for Couric's "Free Speech" segment, which launched when she did in September 2006. The feature allowed ranting from both sides of the political divide, granting air time to both Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh in its first weeks, but was roundly lambasted. The segment lasted just two months before CBS pulled it from the program.

Hartman also reportedly ushered the news show into more feature-centric programming, in turn shying away from breaking news stories. The decision was again panned by critics and CBS insiders and, it seems, by viewers.

While Couric kicked off her new gig last fall at the top of the nightly news heap—CBS' Evening News was the top-rated news show of the three networks for the first two weeks of Couric's run—the anchor quickly fell off viewers' radar.

Not that she seems to mind.

While Couric has always stressed quality of newscast over number of viewers, it's a state of mind that has likely come in quite handy over the past six months.

"I've never really obsessed over ratings," she said during an interview at Manhattan's 92nd St. Y. "I want to turn out a quality newscast."

During last month's sweeps period, her quality show averaged just 7.6 million viewers, falling not only well behind NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams and ABC's World News Tonight with Charles Gibson, but behind numbers that her predecessor, Schieffer, pulled during the same time last year.

Not that her competition is faring so well itself.

For three of the past four weeks, the usual ratings winner NBC has placed second in viewers to Gibson, despite the deployment of Williams to the newsworthy Iraq frontlines. To redress the balance, the program announced last week that its own longtime executive producer, John Reiss, was jumping ship.

As for Hartman, it's been reported that he will remain at CBS News, though in a different capacity. He will be replaced in his position by veteran CNN and MSNBC producer Rick Kaplan.