Categories: OLD Media Moves

The Naked Cowboy is business news, right?

Howard Kurtz had a segment on his CNN show “Reliable Sources” on Sunday in which he discussed the prospects for the new Fox Business Network and had this exchange with CNN’s Ali Velshi and the Chicago Tribune’s Phil Rosenthal:

VELSHI: I’ve been in business news a long time. Never occurred to me once to interview The Naked Cowboy in Times Square, and it’s not going to.

KURTZ: You just aren’t thinking big enough.

VELSHI: Apparently not.

KURTZ: Phil Rosenthal, what about that point? Is there enough, at least from what you’ve seen so far — and look, it’s obviously a bit unfair to judge after one week — but is there enough substantial financial and business information to satisfy junkies?

ROSENTHAL: I think there will be. I think this week — part of this week was to sort of set itself apart. And I think — so you saw a lot of things that you may not see down the road. I mean, the reason you go out and probably do The Naked Cowboy, the reason that you do an item early on on the first day outside the headquarters of CNBC and talk about peacock hunting, a reference to NBC-Universal which owns it, I think is to get on YouTube and to get people talking about you.

I think, you know, they also this week, though, Liz Claman did an interview with Warren Buffet that wound up — CNBC had to quote it. So I think — I think if you look at something like that, I think it’s a work in progress.

Read the rest of the transcript 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.

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