Does a brand-name journalist need a brand-name platform to succeed?
Nearly a year after leaving Yahoo , Katie Couric is betting that the answer is no. Instead, she is striking out on her own, expanding her own production company with outside investment so that it can find its own sponsors and distribution outlets.
The inaugural project of the expanded Katie Couric Media will be a short-form online video series for digital-media outfit theSkimm that will be sponsored by consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, according to the companies. The series, titled “Getting There,” will feature profiles of accomplished women.
Ms. Couric, formerly the CBS Evening News anchor, was once a poster child for mass-market broadcast TV. Now, with TV suffering from falling ratings and viewership fragmentation, brands are looking for new paths to reach audiences, and Ms. Couric’s latest project is emblematic of the models that are emerging.
TheSkimm, which is best known for its free daily email newsletter but increasingly is moving into new membership products and online video, plans to push the videos through its social media channels like Instagram and Facebook , which collectively have two million followers.
Procter & Gamble will run pre-roll video ads before the interviews, according to theSkimm.
The idea for the series emerged from Ms. Couric’s work with the #SeeHer campaign, an initiative of the Association of National Advertisers to try to reduce the unconscious bias against women and girls in advertising and the media. In that capacity, she was introduced to the work Procter & Gamble had been doing on gender bias.
“Their values and my values about educating, informing and enlightening people, getting them to open their eyes and understand, are very much aligned,” Ms. Couric said of Procter & Gamble, adding that she will have “complete editorial independence” over the series.
She will profile women like Eva Chen, head of fashion partnerships at Instagram; Ina Garten, the “Barefoot Contessa” host and cookbook author; and Issa Rae, creator of HBO’s “Insecure.”
Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer at Procter & Gamble, said the decision to sponsor the series is part of a broader shift at the world’s biggest advertiser—home to brands like Tide and Oil of Olay—toward taking more control of the content that its ads support.
Procter & Gamble has been vocal about the lack of transparency in digital media and pulled its ads off YouTube for a year after it discovered them appearing alongside objectionable content.
“It made me start to think about maybe what we should be doing is working with content providers that are right for our brands from the very beginning,” Mr. Pritchard does.
Katie Couric Media, which over the past year has produced things like Ms. Couric’s podcast and a documentary series that aired on the on the National Geographic Channel, is expanding with funding from roughly a dozen investors, including Horizon Media founder Bill Koeningsberg and Lyrical Partners managing partner Jeffrey Keswin.
Ms. Couric and her husband, John Molner, are the controlling investors. Not all projects will involve producing branded content for sponsors, but that will be a major focus, Ms. Couric said.
For theSkimm, whose newsletter boasts a largely female, millennial audience of seven million, the deal represents a new content model as it seeks to push further into online video with its Skimm Studios division.
“This is the first time that we have partnered with any kind of guest correspondent,” said co-founder Carly Zakin. “The type of interviews that she is doing are the types of people our audience loves to hear from.”
Write to Keach Hagey at keach.hagey@wsj.com