After two years of record-low ratings, both CBS News executives and people close to Katie Couric say that the anchor of the struggling CBS Evening News is likely to leave the network well before her contract expires in 2011.

Couric isn’t even halfway through her five-year contract with CBS, which began in June 2006 and pays an annual salary of around $15 million.

But according to the Wall Street Journal, CBS execs are under pressure to cut costs and improve ratings as CBS trails rivals ABC and NBC badly.

Her departure would cap a difficult stretch for CBS, which brought Couric on with considerable fanfare in a bid to catapult the Evening News back into first place.

With the exception of several weeks, Couric has never bested the ratings of interim anchor Bob Schieffer, who replaced Dan Rather, who left in the wake of scandal - his discredited report on the National Guard service of George W. Bush.

Adding to the pressure on CBS to dump Katie Couric and improve the newscast is the faltering performance of CBS’s prime-time schedule and CBS Corp. itself.

Yeah, Two and a Half Men sucks. But can’t they just order up 3-4 more CSIs?

CBS’s stock price has slumped amid questions about company growth potential. Its broadcast network is a key revenue source for CBS - more so than for most media companies, which tend to have a more diverse array of assets.

Some say it’s possible Katie Couric could survive if a major news event lifted the newscast’s ratings, or another shift occurred internally at CBS.

That appears unlikely, however, as the Journal reports that CBS executives are already investigating which prominent news personalities are nearing the end of their contracts around the time of the 2009 inauguration.