Heads up, business news junkies. No need to hold your breath any longer. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Business Network has arrived. And in case you haven’t seen its logo, FBN is big, bold, and gold. It enters the party fashionably late and accompanied by the Dow Jones information empire, elbowing its way into what has arguably been a duopoly controlled over the past few years by the two major cable channels in the game: CNBC and Bloomberg TV. These giants generate a seemingly endless, around-the-clock flow of financial news and analysis to a small but affluent audience of investors and businesspeople. And while advertisers covet these high-end consumers, the overall market still is relatively modest. CNBC’s combined ad revenue and subscriber fees hover at $680 million, and Bloomberg TV’s  revenues are between $50 million and $100 million, according to TV Week. Even if FBN managed to drain away every dime of its competitors’ earnings, it would be a drop in the $26 billion bucket that News Corps.’ eight divisions filled up last year. It’s pretty clear that money isn’t the driving force for Murdoch, at least for the time being. Which leaves the competition wondering just what he does have in mind for FBN and what it means for the rarified world of business TV.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE EYEBALLS
The new channel is projected to reach 30 million homes, which would make it “one of the broadest cable launches in history,” according to David Joyce, an analyst with Miller Tabak. And it would be within shooting distance of its competitors. In the U.S., CNBC reaches 90 million homes and Bloomberg, 49 million. If success depends on meeting these numbers, it’s a genuinely risky proposition. “I wouldn’t be as optimistic if it were anyone other than Murdoch,” says Larry Witt, a media analyst with Morningstar Research. In the U.S. alone, his record is strong, beginning with Fox Broadcasting Company in 1986, Fox News in 1996 — now the most watched cable channel in the country — and most recently, the purchase of online social-networking leader MySpace, currently the most popular such site, receiving more than 69 million unique visitors in August 2007 alone.

Of course, FBN’s membership in the larger family of Fox Television channels — which includes Fox News, Fox Sports, Fox Movie Channel, and FX — will make it a lot easier to avoid one of the major challenges that a new channel faces: managing to get a spot on cable systems. News Corp.’s many popular channels are valuable to cable companies, which gives it a lot of leverage to convince systems to make room for FBN, according Robert Picard, director of the Media Management and Transformation Center and professor of economics at Jönköping International Business School in Sweden.

WHAT’S NEWS GOT TO DO WITH IT?
FBN’s editorial mission and the exact shape of its content have yet to be defined, but there is some question as to just how much you can slice and dice the same information among three round-the-clock networks. Will FBN leave Wall Street coverage to CNBC and Bloomberg and concentrate extensively on the underserved soft consumer news of Main Street, as Murdoch hinted recently at a New York media conference? This seems at odds with the fact that much of the content of FBN will eventually be supplied by Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, which established its stellar reputation by catering to industry professionals. Murdoch said that FBN would launch with or without Dow Jones, but now that the deal is sealed, some have suggested that the channel might eventually change its name to include a reference to the prestigious publication. After months of back and forth, Murdoch finally gained control of Dow Jones & Company Inc. when its controlling family, the Bancrofts, caved in to shareholder pressure and accepted his $5 billion offer.

While no one knows officially what the programming will look like, the driving force behind the business model appears to be synergy, synergy, synergy. The word keeps coming up when discussing FBN’s strengths. “Fox is in a great position to enact synergy,” according to Albarran, both in terms of cross-promotion between sister channels and in terms of content. He envisions something of a hybrid approach. “It may be more consumer focused overall, but it has to appeal to the financial services community to really be a serious competitor to CNBC.” Albarran notes the growing need for financial education across Middle America and the niche filled by personal finance gurus like Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey (who, as I write this, just signed on as a prime-time host with his own show on FBN.) A new, more plebian channel could potentially be a great value to those novice investors if the content is at their level.

Others in the industry, however, caution that a focus on consumer content was attempted once before without great success. Radio Business Report executive editor Jack Messmer writes: “Rupert would do well to look at the history of CNBC if he thinks Main Street consumer news is the way to go with FBN. That was the original plan for CNBC, Consumer News and Business Channel. It failed miserably. NBC only made CNBC a success by throwing out all of its research on what consumers supposedly wanted, buying its spunky chief rival, Financial News Network (FNN), which didn’t have the money for fancy research, and substituting the successful FNN format for the original failed CNBC format.”

AND THE WINNER IS
So despite the excitement in the lead-up to launch date, especially here in New York City, what will FBN’s overall impact on the universe be? Small to none. Sure, advertisers will benefit. Added competition means they can shop around and push for lower rates. And not to be forgotten are those who work in the news business. More job opportunities always are a good thing, especially with such dire prospects at other news outlets. (Extra, Extra: Newspapers are Dying!) But once things settle down, the fate of business news won’t have changed that much. “I don’t think that a year from now we will sit around and say, ‘Wow, we are so lucky to have this,’ ” says Picard.

Creating a cable channel that rocks the business news world may not have been the end point for News Corp., anyway. Note the word “network” in the title. It’s not just a channel, it’s a web of many inter-related worldwide media outlets with a focus on financial news, which turns out to be the kind of content most adaptable to global markets. “Murdoch tends to look at his company as a whole,” says Picard, going as far as floating the idea that News Corp.’s founder likely wants to take on Bloomberg L.P. globally.

Stay tuned.

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