Taking News From Wall Street to Main Street

It’s midnight. One day has ended while another has just begun. But the world has fully embraced the 24-hour news cycle, and many members of the newest business channel to hit the cable lineup are getting their last few moments of rest. At 2:30 a.m. in various homes across the city, buzzers start buzzing, signaling the start of the workday for an unstoppable news force. Jenna Lee’s feet are first to hit the floor; at 5 a.m., she and Nicole Petallides will be the fresh faces that greet some business aficionados as they tune in to FOX Business Morning, which brings viewers information on the world’s markets. By the time the U.S. broadcast day begins, the Asian markets have been open and churning for quite some time. Eric Bolling rises at 3 a.m., but V.P. of FOX Business News, Alexis Glick, is already on her way to the studio at that point. Cody Willard, who jolts awake at 6 a.m., is considered the late sleeper of the bunch. By that time, many members of the FOX Business Network team have been at the station for hours, diligently working to ensure that when America wipes the sleep out of their eyes and tunes in, they are greeted by an informed staff, just as they were on the day FOX Business launched, when Petallides’ voice echoed out over the airwaves with the network’s first words: “Good morning, and welcome to the new FOX Business Network.”

More and more, people are waking up with Lee and Petallides, who are joined at 7 a.m. by Glick, who talks Money for Breakfast along with anchor Peter Barnes. Similar to other news networks, like the more familiar CNBC, FOX Business Network, which went live in October, reports on the effects of Wall Street, but with a twist that interprets the information for the residents of mainstream America. “We try to break things down so that it is not geared towards someone in a particular money bracket,” Lee explains. “There is more than 300 million people in the U.S., and everyone-all ages, colors, and income brackets-are influencing the economy every single day.” Glick emphasizes that the goal of the network is to appeal to both Wall Street and Main Street, not one or the other. She offers a segment on CEO Kenneth Camp of Hillenbrand, a funeral service business that split into two the morning of the interview, as an example of their innovative tactics. The interview centers around how some are having trouble retiring because of the decline of the value of their 401K. “We took a topic with a CEO and turned it into a conversation about the way baby boomers are not able to retire as aggressively because of the turn in the economy. So we had a Wall Street story and took it to Main Street.”

Alexis Glick – Anchor and Vice President

Senior Vice President Neil Cavuto has been entrusted to spearhead the direction of the network since inception, and he took a little bit of the DNA from the Fox News Channel. He agrees with Lee and Glick’s assessment of the idea behind the network: “We avoid jargon, arrogance, and any kind of condescending delivery of business,” he says. “There is something to be said of clarity, of energy, of getting to the gist of a story without trying to sound like you are the smartest kid in the class.” As such, the philosophy of the channel is to ask very basic, to-the-point questions, which generally result in clear and concise viewer-friendly answers from a variety of sources. On any given day, the topics covered by the network can range from entrepreneur profiles and publicly traded companies to the current state of the country’s economy. “We take a very broad approach, we cross many different lines, both economically and socially,” says Glick. “We like that we can transcend and reach everybody.”

Jenna Lee – Anchor

And for those times when the content can be intimidating for someone whose office isn’t located in the Financial District, FOX Business has a translator scrolling on the screen to ensure every viewer can keep up with the topic at hand. “We invested a great deal in our team and in their ability to go through very complicated data and relate it in English with clarity to people,” Cavuto says. “We also try to relate it in our screen-make it simple and easy to read without the droning representation of news elsewhere.”

In fact, FOX Business draws a large amount of their on-air talent from a pool of journalists who have backgrounds with competitors. From Cavuto, who hosted three hours of live programming daily for CNBC, and Cody Willard, who was a frequent guest on CNBC’s Kudlow and Company to Petallides, who was an anchor for Bloomberg Television, many of the network’s top names have amassed their experiences through a variety of other media outlets. “Finding the right people is one of the hardest and most exciting things that we do,” Glick explains. “We try to find people that we believe pop. We want people who translate to the audience, people who are identifiable. The last person we want is someone who is going to talk down to the audience. We want someone you want to sit down with and have a cup of coffee and talk with.” And the one thing that can be said for each of the members is that they are currently singing the praises of the new network, one that seems destined to become the top source for business news, despite a competitor with a 20-year head start.

Cody Willard- Contributor and Co-Host of Happy Hour

Each on-air employee speaks of a strong team that is guided by top-notch executives. Willard, who spends every afternoon at the Bull & Bear pub in the Waldorf Astoria hosting the Happy Hour show that he describes as “where Wall Street meets Rock ‘n’ Roll,” seems downright ecstatic about his role within the young company. “One of the things I like so much about working with FOX is the support and the synergies that they try to create within the company itself, whereas in so many companies, they end up battling with themselves-internal fighting, competing,” he says. “FOX Business is a division of News Corp., so you feel you have the resources of the entire company backing you.”

Bolling, a recent FOX Business Network acquirement, concurs with Willard’s views. “It has been a fantastic experience here,” he explains, reflecting on his recent full-time appointment at the channel after a two-year stint at CNBC as a panelist on Fast Money. “People [at FOX Business] get it. They know what works on TV. They know what people want to hear and they know where to focus the attention, where the viewer doesn’t get caught up in a lot of noise.”

The recurring sentiment echoed by FOX Business members is the team mentality, which many of the correspondents feel very comfortable with, thanks to the athletic backgrounds of the team members. Lee played Division I softball at UC Santa Barbara; Eric Bolling was drafted by the Pirates; Petallides is a self-described jock; and Glick speaks in sports analogies. “I came to FOX [after leaving a position as an co-anchor on NBC’s Today Show] because I had the opportunity to be a player/coach,” she says. “I like not only what I have learned about the TV industry by building and creating a network, but also having the opportunity to have a voice in what we air. It has been the greatest opportunity I have had.”

Nicole Petallides – NYSE Correspondent

Glick joined FOX News as director of business news in fall of 2006, and was appointed vice president of business news in September 2007. Along with Cavuto, Glick was one of the first onboard with the new network, giving her a very full role within the development of the brand. Aside from the anchoring duties, which have her playing to the camera from 7 a.m. until 10 a.m. daily, Glick is actively involved in refining the company philosophy, and she is the first to say that it is hard to measure the brand’s success yet. “We are a new network, and when we get ratings, it will be very hard to track [because FOX Business is in] 30 million homes as opposed to competitors who are in more than 90 million.” The most effective way to track the success is through anecdotal individual stories that are delivered to team members on a constant basis.

“I have heard of a bunch of trading desks changing their channels to us now,” says Petallides. Off-air, she finds herself being recognized in day-to-day situations because more and more traders and firms are switching to FOX Business, having had enough of CNBC. “I don’t want to bash [CNBC] by any means,” she says, “but people were ready for a change. It was something a lot of people were waiting for.” Bolling, who also works as an independent trader based out of the New York Mercantile Exchange, says that many of his colleagues at the exchange first expressed hesitation about changing their channels to the new network, but within a few weeks, FOX Business had won them over.

Eric Bolling – Contributor

Not that the network’s growth happened without growing pains, something that every new company experiences, regardless of industry. The difference at FOX Business is that said pains occur on air. But Cavuto, who has broad experience at start-up networks, says, “We are having the same growing pains FOX News Channel had, the same growing pains CNBC had. We got off the ground and one could always use more of everything, but invariably, you make do with what you have.”

And what they have are team members that are willing to go out on a limb for the network. “Along the way, there are certain challenges that come up and come out, and you have to work as a family to try to figure them out,” says Lee. “This is the kind of process we are in on a daily, if not hourly, if not by minute basis, because we are live television. Sometimes it’s hard because there are mistakes and there are challenges, and sometimes you play them out for the viewers live. At the same time, I think that is a very endearing quality of the network to be about to put ourselves out there, up for critique.”

Each of the members feels the support of the network when they do break the mold. “We can kid around, we can talk hard business, we can cover breaking news, we have fun, and we don’t feel like we are going to be crucified if we don’t follow a certain recipe,” says Petallides. “We are our own entity. It’s like an evolution and we are growing and we are seeing what is and isn’t working.”

The largest challenge the network has faced is growth and distribution. “It is hard to rate and grow as an organization if you do not succeed in getting into more homes,” says Cavuto. “I know full well how daunting our odds are, but with FOX News President Roger Ailes’ efforts and Rupert Murdoch’s vision, we’ll get there.”

At the network, spirits are high, as are their sights, which are set on market domination. “In our first week, we really aced it,” says Petallides. “And it has only gotten better since then.”