Categories: OLD Media Moves

Few viewers for Fox Business Network early on

Jacques Steinberg and Brian Stelter of The New York Times write Friday that Fox Business Network has attracted few viewers in the first two months on the air.

Steinberg and Stelter wrote, “About 6,300, on average, on any given weekday, according to early estimates compiled by Nielsen Media Research. By contrast, Fox Businessâ€™s chief competitor, CNBC, attracted about 283,000 viewers each weekday from Oct. 15 through Dec. 14, the first two months that Fox Business was on the air, according to Nielsenâ€™s calculations.

“While Nielsen, at the networkâ€™s request, has measured the viewership of Fox Business since its premiere, Nielsen is not permitted to release or even confirm those figures publicly. That is because they are so low as to fall below Nielsenâ€™s minimum standards for reporting, said Gary Holmes, a Nielsen spokesman.

Both Fox and CNBC, however, have purchased versions of those weekly ratings reports from Nielsen, and a person who saw those internal reports vouched for their contents on Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity.”

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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.