Business News Network, 10 years later

Howard Green, a founding anchor of Business News Network, writes about the early days of Canada’s business news channel, celebrating its 10th anniversary.

Green writes, “Before we had our own channel, we inched our way onto the airwaves via a series of 45 second newscasts that emanated from a broom closet at the newspaper.   There, armed with a computer, a camera and a self-driven teleprompter, a woman named Brenda Craig spat out 11 newscasts a day that were fed to CTV in Agincourt where they were replayed on the network’s new all-news channel. The content was terrible.  I know.  I did it a few days myself.

“Once we had our own channel, BNN or ROBTv as we called it then, also got off to a flimsy start.  We were so far up the dial — channel 75 –no one knew we were there.  We were crammed into a dirty little office and studio at the enviable Toronto address of Jarvis Street, just south of Carlton.  Used condoms littered the driveway.  Pigeons got into the studio.  The investors had so much faith in the enterprise, they would only guarantee 4 months employment.  If it didn’t work by Christmas, they let us know they’d pull the plug.

“Fortunately, the channel was launched during a stock mania.  Anything with a dot-com attached to its name saw its shares go up just about every day.  The Nasdaq went to 3,000, then 4,000, then 5,000 in the first six months we were on the air.   Nortel shares were grooving right along with it. Within a year, that stock would hit its all-time high and never reach it again.  Curiously, the current age of BNN roughly spans the timeframe of Nortel’s meteoric rise and tragic disappearance.”

Read more here.