Red faces were all the fashion at Maryland Public Television last spring when executives decided to unceremoniously sack longtime stock chat host Louis Rukeyser, ending nearly three decades of his "Wall Street Week."
   Rukeyser, rather than go quietly, went on a  public tear over his dismissal,  ripping apart MPT executives as fumbling and dishonest  incompetents.
   Now, MPT executives are a lot more than red-faced. Canning Rukeyser is proving to have been a financial blunder of massive proportions. The network is in serious financial trouble, causing a raft of layoffs and salary cuts.
   The sponsorships MPT had expected under the revamped program hosted by Fortune editors have failed to come through. 
   Many of those with the show during Rukeyser's tenure have followed him to CNBC, where his new show debuted in June. They included Occidental Petroleum, A.G. Edwards, and Oppenheimer Funds. A fourth, Deloitte & Touche, decided to sponsor neither show.
   MPT's new "Wall Street Week" has aired since June with no national sponsors. Jan Wilson, chief marketing officer at Maryland Public Television, says MPT hopes to have some deals in place soon. "We're in negotiation with some very prominent companies," she says.
    The show's new anchors, Karen Gibbs and Geoffrey Colvin, adhere to a format "familiar to longtime watchers," Wilson says, "but we want to be relevant to today's viewer." 
    The show's new direction was widely interpreted as a shot at the 69-year-old Rukeyser's age. When announcing his dismissal in the spring, MPT officials said his style was failing to attract new viewers, and by importing Gibbs from the sassy Fox network and Colvin from Fortune, the producers expected to attract a new type of financial viewer--i.e., younger. Indeed, MPT officials said that had they kept Rukeyser, PBS would not have distributed the show nationally this fall, so the $6 million in corporate sponsorships he took with him, they argue, wouldn't have been available anyway.
    It's not clear yet whether the new "Wall Street Week" is actually reaching those younger viewers. What is clear is that it's reaching fewer viewers overall. The show's 700,000 households last week is about a third worse than it averaged in the days of Rukeyser. 
    Meanwhile, "Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street," while reaching fewer households than "Wall Street Week," has helped CNBC to improve on its ratings in the 8:30 p.m. Friday timeslot. 
    Moreover, the show has gotten considerable exposure over the broadcast airwaves thanks to more than 140 PBS stations that air rebroadcasts, which they're not allowed to do until after midnight on Fridays. 
    Last week, MPT announced plans to cut more than 13 percent of its work force and decrease the salaries of some of its highest-ranking officers and other employees due to a revenue shortfall of $2.1 million.
     MPT CEO Robert Shulman defended the Rukeyser situation, saying in a statement issued after the layoffs were announced, "MPT acted to reinvigorate our 32-year program to avoid losing its vitally important primetime Friday spot on the PBS schedule. The permanent loss of that position would have triggered an irreplaceable revenue loss, and with the previous ' Wall Street Week' format, we were in danger of facing just that."

August 28, 2002© 2002 Media Life

-Luc Hatlestad  is writer living in the San Francisco area.

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