The New York Times reports that CBS anchor Katie Couric is getting a bump from her presence on the Internet:

Katie Couric has been the most watched, most talked-about network news anchor this election season. Just not necessarily on CBS.

Consider that the three most popular YouTube videos of her interviews with Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, have been seen nearly six million times over the last two weeks, far more than similar interviews with Ms. Palin by others.

After years of speculation about whether young (or even middle-aged) viewers will ever again turn on a dinnertime network newscast, Ms. Couric and her producers appear to have made an end run around the network itself. By getting their best programming (or at least excerpts of it) online, they may have seized on a template for the not-so-distant future, tapping into the Web as a neon road sign directing traffic to their network broadcasts and perhaps, eventually, as a destination in itself.

Couric’s Palin interviews were a rare opportunity, and have gone nucular on YouTube. 

But their popularity, and the way they’ve brought new respect to Couric, highlight the fact that the mainstream networks have a long way to go to really take advantage of the Internet.

They need to put their content where people’s attention is moving and they need to package their content in viral bite-size chunks. Expect CBS to be making a lot better use of YouTube after the response to the Couric-Palin interviews.