NBC Will Still Have To Pay Ann Curry $10 Million A Year

Yesterday, we reported that NBC’s Ann Curry is currently on the chopping block. Although the rumors say she’s getting the axe next week, her firing could be costly for the network who will still have to pay her through her contract.

Though Today co-host Ann Curry is absolutely being shown the door according to TMZ, they also say that NBC will “pay dearly for its blunder.” Why? Because the anchor is under contract with the media company – a three year contract guaranteeing her a $10 million payout each year she’s under that contract.

It’s not entirely certain what soured Curry’s career on Today. Drop in ratings, estrangement from co-host Matt Lauer, not being as good at the job as her predecessor Meredith Vieira, who knows. Opines Jack Shafer of Reuters, morning talk shows don’t really hold a lot of interest for viewers in the first place. According to him, it’s simple. “It’s just that I dislike the shows for being dulled-down messes of news, entertainment and talk. If I watch any of them, it’s by accident,” he says, continuing, “My lack of interest in the morning-show mix puts me in the majority. Today, which is usually the number-one-rated program, and ABC’s Good Morning America, which took that position a couple of times this spring, draw an average of fewer than 5 million viewers. The third-ranked show, CBS’s This Morning, pulls in a little more than 2 million viewers. In a country of 311 million, that’s minimal interest.”

Curry’s departure has been dressed up as a hush-hush soap opera, or as Shafer puts it, all of the ambiguous verbiage makes “the departure of a TV co-host sound like the final days of Richard Nixon,” but it’s probably much-ado-about-nothing after all since… well… no one is watching.

In any case, Curry won’t necessarily be retiring. TMZ says she’ll be picking up a job as a foreign correspondent for NBC. “Short story… she’ll be the first foreign correspondent who will rake in an amount equal to the gross national product of some of the countries she will cover,” they quip.