Katie Couric says goodbye to ‘hi’

Close watchers of the “CBS Evening News” may have noticed a subtle change in recent weeks. Instead of opening with a breezy “Hi, everyone,” anchor Katie Couric has modified her welcome to the slightly more subdued “Hello, everyone.”

“Now it’s a little formal,” she told Stephen Colbert on Thursday during an appearance on his late-night Comedy Central show.

The semantic shift comes as CBS is moving the newscast back to a more traditional format, acknowledging that efforts to remake it for a younger audience have not gone over well with longtime viewers

But that doesn’t mean Couric is going to return to the standard opening of “Good evening.”

“I thought, really, the only people who say ‘good evening’ are doormen and maitre d’s,” she told Colbert. “I found it just to be a little pretentious and portentous, so I thought something more relaxed and casual would be a little more accessible.”