CNBC will keep its name after spinoff

Business news channel CNBC will keep its name after it and other operations are spun off from parent Comcast, reports Oliver Darcy in his Status newsletter.

Darcy reports, “With regard to CNBC, the powers at be have rendered a decision. I’m told by a person with direct knowledge of the matter that CNBC will be permitted to keep its name when SpinCo gets off the ground next year.”

CNBC was founded in April 1989 as the Consumer News and Business Channel, a joint venture between NBC and Cablevision. Following its 1991 bankruptcy, NBC acquired the competing Financial News Network and merged it into CNBC, and acquired Cablevision’s stake in CNBC to give it full ownership.

NBCUniversal announced last month its intent to spin off most of its cable networks, including CNBC, as a new publicly-traded company controlled by Comcast shareholders.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.