Categories: OLD Media Moves

How to attract Main Street to Fox Business Network

Russ Britt of Marketwatch writes Saturday about how Fox Business Network will need to attract average viewers to be successful.

On the Fox Business web site, Britt explained, “One personality, Cheryl Casone, complains of how women in Manhattan commonly spend $500 on a pair of shoes or $1,000 for a purse. Another, Cody Willard, wonders why more attention hasn’t been paid in the scientific community to a phenomenon known as ‘solar dimming’ as opposed to global warming.

“And anchor-to-be Jenna Lee tells her audience that although she has rock music programmed into her iPod, she prefers to tune into country music artists such as Tim McGraw and Carrie Underwood, a winner several seasons back of the Fox Network’s song competition, ‘American Idol.’

“‘The Dixie Chicks are in constant rotation,’ Lee writes of the controversial trio. ‘Justin Timberlake, on the other hand, doesn’t have a chance.’

“It’s unclear how all this is relevant to business coverage. There are concerns in some circles that Fox Business will look a lot like Fox News, with many of the same conservative sensibilities.”

Read more here.

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.