Claman of Fox Biz prepares for Buffett coverage

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

When Fox Business Network anchor Liz Claman made her debut on the network in October 2007, her first interview was with legendary investor Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Claman, a former CNBC anchor, has since interviewed Buffett a number of times on the air and will go to Omaha, Neb., this weekend to provide live coverage of the Berkshire annual meeting. The coverage begins Friday at 2 p.m. and lasts through Monday at 9:30 a.m., when Claman will interview Buffett and Bill Gates for one hour.

Claman talked to Talking Biz News on Tuesday morning about her preparations for that coverage, and how Fox Business is doing. What follows is an edited transcript.

1. What do you do before you go out to Omaha?

This processs literally started the day I got back from Omaha a year ago. It was the first time at Fox Business covering the annual shareholder meeting and we were trhilled with the exclusive we got with Buffett sitting down with Bill Gates.

So we began with our producers discussing what we should do differently this year and then booking guests about six months ago, locking them in. It’s a circus. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen. What other annual meeting has the CEO playing a ukelele and a bull walking around? And Berkshire Hathaway, with 70 companies under its umbrella, reflects the broader economy. So when ou put it all together, you get a very interesting amalgam of how the economy is doing. So we tried to book the CEOs of some of those companies.

2. Buffett has become much more accessible to the business media in the past decade. Why do you think that’s the case?

Mr. Buffett chose to conduct his entire business environment from Omaha. People looked at him as some kind of quirky, unattainable individual. And the fact that he was the world’s richest man probably intimidating some people. When I got to CNBC, it had been up and running for nine years, and it was another six or seven years before I was able to land a sit down, hour-long interview. These guys don’t have to talk to the media. They’re not public officials. I studied him, and I think the key that I put into the lock opened the door. Once he saw the way that some of us conducted ourselves, he realized it didn’t hurt. And he’s also a generous man when it comes to intellectual property.

3. Why is Buffett such an important story to business news consumers?

Because he’s been right on so many levels and so many occasions. He is important to anybody with money and anybody who cares about their money. They can find some real value in what he has to say. He has a formula, and that’s equally as important as sticking to the formula. Buffett never abandons his formula, and when it comes to money, people get very emotional, and he doesn’t. You can learn a lot from listening to people like that. Plus he’s very plain spoken and matter of fact. He and his partner Charlie Munger once said, “Wall Street hates us because we’re too simple for them.”

4. What niche is Fox Business filling in the business news world?

We’re the baby on the block, but the baby is flexing a little bit of muscle, I am proud to say. In 18 months, we’ve managed to convince big business leaders that we do matter, and they do come on, everyone from Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who will reprise their interview from last year with me on Monday. I got replies to do it again about 7 minutes after I put in the request. Alan Mullaly of Ford has been able to look at us and say,  “I want to speak to the Fox Business viewer.”

It wasn’t always like that. We’ve proven to people that we’re serious about journalism, particularly with our FOI requests. That’s what American journalism is supposed to do. We’re supposed to question authority. That goes under Republican presidents and Democratic presidents. We’re not supposed to be a microphone for big business. We’re here for the people.

5. How can Fox Business continue to gain viewers?

We’re not tap dancing to save our lives. We are speaking to our viewers in a new way. We had the Dave Ramsey special last week. I was sucked in completely by the message, which I found fascinating. All it was was a guy on the stage with an important message about tuning out all of the malestrom of the recession and saying you are responsible for your success or failure.

We’ve got to keep doing what we’re doing. I have hedge funds guys that tell me that they have a dedicated monitor to Fox Business. That is thrilling to me. They switched over as they started to hear and read about stories that we have broken. We broke the story back in September about how the SEC was going to curb naked short selling. Forty minutes after we broke it, they put out a press release to announce it. That stuff is important to Wall Street.

We also need not to speak down to viewers. Someone last week used the term “black swan.” You and I may know what it means, but most readers don’t. We have a Fox Translator that explains these terms on the screen, and that brings the people into the fold who have been left out in terms of business news.

6. What would be one thing that you think Fox Business could do to improve?

Viewership. We want more viewers. If there is anything I’d love from CNBC, it’s their viewers. That is a slow process. We have our sister network Fox News to look up to. In a network, in its first couple of months, it was staring up at CNN with bureaus in Beirut and Cairo, and we had a truck driving around New York, looking for news. Five years later, they were dancing on the tables. So we know it can be done, but we have to do it in our own way. We’re a business network. We’re not a punditry network. We’re there to follow money, business, investors and any American who cares about their future and encironment. But we have fun doing it. That’s crucial.

7. What do you see changing in terms of the future of business journalism?

I think business journalists already realize that left unattended, Wall Stret can get itself into major trouble. It’s our role to sound the alarm bells when appropriate, and sound the cheers for small business out there. Business journalism tends to ignore small business, and we’re not doing that. We try to get them on the air every day. That’s where the real void is. Anyone can cover the Dow 30. What about the guy running a business in Tennessee, a clothing store, where he’s now serving bourbon to bring in more customers?

There’s a line that you can find to follow, and we will be a steam train. We’re just laying down our tracks now, to quote Peter Gabriel.