Categories: OLD Media Moves

Assessing Fox Business with Imus

Brian Stelter of the New York Times writes Monday about why Fox Business Network would want to add radio show host Don Imus to its lineup.

Stelter writes, “In turning to Mr. Imus to bolster Fox Business, the News Corporation is taking a page from the playbook of its sibling channel Fox News, which now drives the companyâ€™s financial growth. Fox, founded 13 years ago, successfully translated talk radio values to TV, sometimes by directly hiring radio talkers like Sean Hannity. Already, Fox Business counts two radio veterans, Dave Ramsey and Tom Sullivan, as hosts.

“Television analysts and some competitors said Mr. Imus, who reportedly reaches millions of radio listeners, would act as a one-man sampling strategy for Fox Business, motivating new viewers to turn on the sometimes hard-to-find network for the first time. In an interview last week about ratings, the executive vice president for the network, Kevin Magee, suggested that was exactly what it needed.

â€œ’We have to teach people we exist, and then convince them to find us,’ Mr. Magee said. ‘And then once they do those two things, they have to watch us.'”

View Comments

Pat says:
September 4, 2009 at 1:12 am
We have been following Imus since he was on MSNBC. We followed him to RFD and we will follow him to FBN. In fact as he talked about FBN on his show we started to watch them and that was the first place we thought he would go after he left RFD. Good luck to him. I'm sure he will boost their ratings.