Financial TV shows suffer hard times, too
By Gary Strauss, USA TODAY
The battle between the dean of business television and the new kids on the block is 6 months old.
For now, both sides look like ratings losers.
Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser was TV's most-watched business program for 32 years, until a nasty March dispute with PBS officials over the program's content and direction led to his ouster. Cable channel CNBC quickly signed him.
Since June 28, Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street has gone head-to-head against PBS successor Wall Street Week with Fortune and co-hosts Geoff Colvin and Karen Gibbs. But this vaunted matchup, at least so far, looks like a bust. The combined prime-time audience for both shows is about 20% less than what Rukeyser had by himself at PBS.
The Friday-night fight for eyeballs underscores waning enthusiasm for most business television programming — particularly pure business shows. Although viewership rebounded during Wall Street's recent eight-week rally, interest in financial news remains far below the halcyon levels of the bull market, when investor euphoria spawned almost 24/7 business programming, strong growth at CNBC and specialty business cable channels such as Bloomberg and CNNfn.
Plunging stock prices, the economy, corporate misdeeds and investor distrust in stock analysts and market strategists is crimping ratings. With Wall Street almost certainly headed for a third consecutive year of losses, there are few signs viewers will flock back anytime soon.
"Viewer distaste over the stock market has made business programming a really tough environment," says Larry Moscow, Wall Street Week with Fortune's executive producer and a veteran of CNBC and cable channels CNN and MSNBC. "People no longer trust talking heads."
While the audience for business shows has never been huge, it is still one that Madison Avenue covets: executives who influence corporate buying and well-educated consumers with large investment portfolios and a penchant for luxury goods.
Consequently, business shows can be cash cows, commanding higher advertising rates. Even with the economic downturn and decrease in viewers, CNBC continues to generate an estimated $300 million in annual profit for parent company General Electric, unchanged from 2000.
Louis Rukeyser, right, leads a roundtable discussion on Wall Street.
"It's a very affluent, successful audience," says David Friend, CNBC's programming chief. "Advertisers know that, and they pay us a premium to advertise."
Rukeyser's prime-time CNBC audience has been building during hard times, to an average 526,000 viewers. Rukeyser says weekly viewership hits about 1 million if you add in viewers of CNBC repeats and the PBS stations that have opted to carry the show.
"The audience is growing so fast, it'll soon be possible to say again that we have the most widely watched money program in the world," says Rukeyser, 69. He spurned offers from other networks, signing a one-year deal with CNBC so he could compete head-to-head with PBS and allow individual PBS stations to rebroadcast the show.
Still, as recently as January 2001, Rukeyser was pulling in 2.65 million PBS viewers a show.
'Wall Street Week' post-Rukeyser
Wall Street Week with Fortune has had its own difficulties. The show was rushed on air three months earlier than planned because of Rukeyser's abrupt departure. Gibbs and Colvin, a Fortune magazine editor with no prior experience as a TV host, appeared uncomfortable together in early shows. Critics have been unkind. The program's format, content and focus are very different from what viewers were accustomed to with Rukeyser. Gone is the awkward practice of having both hosts jointly interviewing guests. Still missing are Rukeyser's erudition and humor.
While Wall Street Week with Fortune has featured a number of well-known CEOs, many of its guests have been little-known players on Wall Street — a contrast to the cadre of well-known market strategists and portfolio managers long part of Rukeyser's show. Twenty-two remain loyal to Rukeyser and have vowed not to appear on PBS' show, Rukeyser says.
Moscow says that while Wall Street Week with Fortune continues to tinker with its format, the emphasis is on providing personal finance advice to those saving for retirement or their kids' college education.
"We're not interested in the same people that were on Rukeyser's show," Moscow says. "A lot of them have turned out to be wrong about the market. We're trying to create a new model looking at broader issues. We're looking to build a core audience with new voices and better guests."
Moscow says he isn't worried about ratings, either. The show's peak prime-time audience was Sept. 28, with 1.4 million viewers. Since then, viewership has slumped 20% to an average of about 1.1 million. That's a drop of 44% from Rukeyser's final March PBS numbers.
PBS is banking on a growing audience as viewers get acclimated to the program. But Gibbs says the combination of a down market and Rukeyser's legacy makes new programming a hard follow-up act. Rukeyser's show was — and is — a reflection of personality as much as content. "People had gotten comfortable with him," Gibbs says. "He was like a nice old slipper. Sometimes when you replace the slipper, it takes time to get used to a new one."
"Maryland Public Television (the show's producer) and PBS have made a commitment to the show," Gibbs says. "I don't think they are going to pull the plug."
More troubling: The show has yet to attract national corporate sponsors. Rukeyser's four corporate underwriters covered the show's costs and provided Maryland Public Television an estimated $6 million annually. The sponsors left when Rukeyser was fired, forcing MPT to trim 14% of its workers and millions from its operating budget.
"It's been a tough advertising market for everyone," says Maryland Public Television marketing chief Jan Wilson, who hopes to line up at least one national sponsor who would begin underwriting the program in January. "The problems aren't unique to us."
Sharing the pain
Much of the success of the biggest daily business-news program, PBS' syndicated Nightly Business Report, is due to its long-standing, no-nonsense wrap-up of economic, business and market news. It has had a stable audience of about 1.1 million viewers, says Stuart Zuckerman, the program's sales and marketing chief.
PBS viewers are intensely loyal. Rivals say NBR also has an advantage against competitors because it is widely syndicated on free TV and airs at 6:30 p.m., when household viewership is rising. PBS is available in 106.7 million homes, vs. 86.7 million for CNN, 85.3 million for CNBC and 81 million for the Fox News channel.
Most other business programming is suffering. The fallout is most dramatic at CNBC, once uniquely positioned to capture daily viewers trading stocks during Wall Street's boom.
On average, just 268,000 viewers tune in now between 5 a.m. and 8 p.m. — an audience comparable to the population of Spokane, Wash. For the current quarter, CNBC's daytime viewers are down 8% from a year ago and 15% below the fourth quarter of 2000.
The star power of Maria Bartiromo, CNBC's best-known journalist, continues to fade. Ratings for Monday night's After Hours with Maria Bartiromo have sunk 42% since August, to just 117,000 viewers. That's 80% below what Rivera Live was pulling in for CNBC in the time slot in November 2001, before Geraldo Rivera's departure to the Fox network. (CNBC says ABC's Monday Night Football saps her audience.)
CNBC's more recent ventures into prime-time business-oriented programming, which essentially began in July, are faring worse than the well-established shows they replaced.
Kudlow & Cramer, the quirkily entertaining show featuring low-key economist Lawrence Kudlow and over-caffeinated former hedge fund manager Jim Cramer, continues to build a fan base Mondays through Fridays from 8 to 9 p.m. Yet the show averages just 237,000 viewers. That's 41% below year-ago viewers for Hardball with Chris Matthews, now on MSNBC
Wall Street Journal Editorial Board averages just 233,000 viewers Fridays from 9 to 10 p.m., 53% below Rivera Live.
CNBC's Friend says official ratings numbers underestimate viewers. Factoring in office, restaurant and health club viewers, Friend says CNBC's daytime audience is 40% larger than what's measured by Nielsen Media Research, which bases ratings solely on household viewership.
Broadening the news
However CNBC's audience is measured, its daytime programs have expanded beyond their traditional heavy dose of market news. In part, that's a move to recoup viewers cannibalized by Fox News' Our World with Neil Cavuto and CNN's Lou Dobbs Moneyline.
Both shows, while heavily business-oriented, frequently are loaded with broader, general-interest news, such as the recent Washington, D.C.-area sniper attacks, which provided a ratings boost for virtually all TV news shows.
"We have a broader and deeper mandate than stock market programs," Dobbs says. "Our focus is on news that affects what goes on in people's lives. That resonates with our audience."
Year-to-date, Moneyline has averaged about 528,000 viewers, down about 2% from the first quarter. But before his return in 2001 after a two-year stint running Internet start-up Space.com, Moneyline was averaging fewer than 300,000 viewers.
Cavuto's audience, which grew rapidly through 2001, has essentially been flat since January. With 705,000 viewers, the 6-year-old program is now the second-most-watched daily business show, behind only Nightly Business Report.
Cavuto has benefited in part from Fox News' overall rise in viewership and his show's frequent mix of business and general news.
Cavuto also says he tries to speak to viewers without talking down to them and provide entertaining programs. He also eschews the stock analysts and prognosticators many viewers now shun.
Rukeyser believes it's just a matter of time — and an extended Wall Street rally — before viewers' interest in stocks and market prognosticators returns.
"Business programs have been affected by the market's performance," he says. "We may not be partying like it's 1999, but a decade from now, we'll look back at this period as a series of bear markets" for stocks and business programming. |
