Small business coverage, and no stars

Glenn Garvin of The Miami Herald interviewed Fox head Roger Ailes this past week and was able to get out of him that the upcoming Fox Business Network would focus more on small business coverage and not have as many stars as rival CNBC.

Garvin wrote, “‘They’re very market-centric,’ he argues. ‘They spend a lot of time on last quarter’s earnings. I watched damn near an hour one afternoon while they beat up on some poor company over its quarterly report.

“‘Small business creates the most jobs in America. They don’t do much with small business. We’ll do more than that. There will be differences in the presentation aspects, too. . . . I think most people would agree that Fox News is presented differently than CNN. Fox Business will be presented differently than CNBC.’

“One traditional way to do that is star power. So far, Fox Business hasn’t gone that route, though it has signed up Cavuto, whose Your World on the Fox News Channel is the highest-rated business show on TV; former Today host and senior CNBC reporter Alexis Glick; and syndicated radio shouter Dave Ramsey.

”’Most of our people are modestly known or not known at all, though I guess Cavuto’s an exception to that and Alexis has a following from her NBC days,’ Ailes says. ‘People talk about getting stars and they say we have Bill O’Reilly at Fox News, but O’Reilly wasn’t a star when he started at Fox News.”

Read more here.