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Wall Street Weeks
Debuting Fortune show vs. Rukeyser on CNBC
By David Moore
When "Wall Street Week with Fortune" debuts tonight on PBS, no one will be watching it more closely than Louis Rukeyser.
Rukeyser, who hosted "Wall Street Week" for 32 years, has been trashing the show to anyone who will listen since he was dumped in March in favor of younger hosts and a faster format.
As host of a rival financial program on CNBC that airs head-to-head against "Wall Street Week," he's been working to undermine his old employer in other ways as well.
But "Wall Street Week with Fortune" may not need Rukeyser's generous help to fall on its face. In going after younger viewers, the show may be targeting an audience that's just not that into investing shows, according to one analyst.
"Wall Street Week with Fortune" will feature a faster-paced, newsier format meant to attract a demographic more like the one that reads Fortune magazine, whose median reader age is 49.
Under the chatty Rukeyser, age 69, the average age of a “Wall Street Week” viewer was 62.
For the new version, Geoffrey Colvin, the editorial director of Fortune, and Karen Gibbs, most recently with Fox News, will share hosting duties. Colvin is 48 years old.
PBS is publicizing the new “Wall Street Week” with a $1 million targeted ad campaign in major newspapers. Fortune has offered up complimentary ad pages in its three titles.
Brad Adgate, the senior vice president and director of research at Horizon Media, says that a more stylish design won’t necessarily pull in a younger audience for a stock roundup.
“It’s always tough to get younger people. They don’t make as much money as baby boomers or older people, so they don’t have as much vested interest in business shows,” says Adgate.
“What you want to do is bring in new viewers without losing old viewers. You don’t want to lose the viewers that have been with the show for years by jazzing it up.”
Rukeyser, who now hosts a rival show on CNBC, has scored points by poaching the underwriters away from his old show.
Three of four sponsors for “Wall Street Week”-- OppenheimerFunds Inc., A.G. Edwards Inc. and Occidental Petroleum Corp. -- have migrated with Rukeyser over to CNBC.
The underwriting for “Wall Street Week” formerly brought in around $6 million annually for Maryland Public Television, which meant a sizable profit margin for a show that only costs about $2 million to produce.
The woes continued for MPT when “Wall Street Week’s” interim hosts, CBS Marketwatch commentator Marshall Loeb and former CBS News economist Ray Brady, saw a plunge in ratings from a height of 2.7 million under Rukeyser to under 2.2 million.
“Louis Rukeyser’s Wall Street,” which launched in April on CNBC, goes up directly against “Wall Street Week” and hews closely to his traditional formula.
The show had 226,000 viewers last week, a fraction of the numbers he used to command but still an improvement for CNBC over its previous performance in the timeslot.
In yet another blow to MPT, about 147 of the 349 PBS stations across the country have opted to pick up Rukeyser’s new show, free of charge.
CNBC bars stations from running it at 8:30 p.m. on Fridays, but repeats are airing on PBS affiliates, oftentimes in place of reruns of “Wall Street Week.”
Guests on the inaugural episode of “Wall Street Week with Fortune” will be former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin and James Chanos, a bearish analyst who was an early critic of Enron.
“Louis Rukeyser’s Wall Street” has booked the well-known stock guru Peter Lynch for tomorrow evening.
June 28, 2002© 2002 Media Life
-David Moore is a staff writer for Media Life.
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