Breaking Celebrity News Staff Reporter

Goodbye Oprah, hello Katie!

Television news personality Katie Couric has inked a new deal to come back to daytime television and she’ll host her own talk show on ABC starting in 2012.

“It is tremendously exciting to have the creative freedom to develop my own show…and to contribute to such a vibrant, innovative news division,” she said in a statement.

Couric, 54, spent the last five years as the anchor of the CBS Evening News, and before that was a viewer favorite on The Today Show.

Now that Oprah Winfrey has retired, the afternoon spot is open and Couric would be a perfect replacement for the queen of daytime TV.

ABC is the network where Couric first started working and she said “I’m happy to be returning to the network where I began my career as a desk assistant in 1979.”

Katie Couric is the winner of the distinguished DuPont, Murrow and Cronkite Awards and numerous Emmys. 

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