Crash Gives Market Outlets a + Tick : FNN and KWHY Keep Track of Wall Street Gyrations

It may have been acatastrophe for millions of Americans, but the stock market crash and its aftershocks could prove to be a bonanza for television outlets that cover the minute-to-minute tremblings of the world’s financial markets.

“This is our equivalent of a major earthquake or a presidential assassination,” says Dick Goldberg, West Coast news director for the Santa Monica-based Financial News Network. “It is a major tragedy and people want all the information they can get.”

Desperate for immediate reports on Wall Street’s recent fluctuations, people have been tuning in record numbers to Financial News Network, the cable channel that attempts to cover the market’s every move, and to KWHY Channel 22, the local station that has been broadcasting financial news to Southern California since 1967, according to spokesmen at the stations.

Though investor panic has subsided as the market has calmed down over the last few weeks,

5Joel Siebert, operations director at KWHY, estimates that his audience is still twice what it was before the Oct. 19 crash. And FNN reports that its ratings jumped from a .3 to a 1.1 (each rating point represents 280,000 households nationwide) during the late-afternoon hours of the volatile days that followed the crash.

Both FNN and KWHY broadcast the market’s ticker tape at the bottom of the television screen. Though, contractually, the television tickers must run 15 minutes behind the actual stock exchange tape, their commentators frequently update stock prices orally, providing their audiences with an almost instantaneous report of the market’s ups and downs.

“In an extremely volatile market, people need instantaneous information,” says Eve Krzyzanow-ski, FNN vice president of news programming. “This was the kind of story we’ve been preparing for for years.”

Founded in 1981 and now available in 28 million homes nationwide, FNN was the first TV news organization to report the precipitous market slide just moments after the New York exchange opened on Oct. 19, according to a network spokesman.

“We watch the market all day every day, so when it shifts violently we’re right there to cover it,” Goldberg says. “It’s like firemen. You go out on all the little fires so that when the big one hits, you know what to do.”

To stay on the air, both FNN and KWHY sell blocks of their air time to financial advertisers to promote their own services--such as Jim Kelly, an options specialist with Dean Witter Reynolds who, according to Siebert, buys a 15-minute segment every week on KWHY. KWHY sells half its air time in chunks--$350 for a 15-minute investment pitch, $750 a week for one five-minute segment each weekday. Some of the station’s experts who offer up-to-the-minute analysis of the market also occasionally buy air time for themselves and their products.

FNN sells 2 1/2 hours out of its 14-hour broadcast day to financial institutions, for $4,000 to $6,000 per 30-minute block, which are clearly marked as paid advertising. But the network, which lost more than $17 million during its first four years before scaling back its operation and finally turning a profit in 1986, is now looking to reduce this lucrative practice as well.

“Selling that time kept FNN alive for many years,” Goldberg says, “but we don’t like the idea of having to leave these half-hour gaps in our coverage.”

As part of its everyday market coverage, FNN is in touch with market analysts and traders all over the country. When the market plunged Oct. 19, the FNN anchors began interviewing these experts, who included the president of the Charles Schwab brokerage firm admonishing the audience not to panic.

While nearly every analyst on the air espouses a different view--some predicted doom on the day of the crash, others shrugged it off as a necessary market correction--Goldberg says that FNN itself does not offer investment advice. Instead, he says, it attempts to provide a broad range of opinion from experts in the business and then tries to help the viewer put those opinions into some kind of practical perspective.

Many viewers who were unable to get through to their brokers during those first frantic days jammed the phone lines at FNN and KWHY seeking advice and reassurance. “There were so many people calling in that we had trouble getting a line out of here,” KWHY’s Siebert says.

Both stations regularly offer call-in shows with their experts, and when the market crisis began, FNN increased the hours of those programs to accommodate viewer demand.

Such tireless coverage, some analysts say, helped stave off an even greater catastrophe. “The information, advice and analysis on FNN greatly calmed the marketplace,” says Robert Simms of Simms Capital Management Inc., a worldwide financial management company. “Without them there would have been a number of people who, out of sheer fear of the unknown, probably would have sold off everything they had the next day.”

Some brokers complain that the wildly divergent opinions these financial channels routinely serve up sometimes confuse their clients and at times can even whip up a bit of hysteria. But in general, they concede, a wide variety of expert opinions can only help the general public better understand the world’s complex financial marketplace.

FNN is available to 1.3 million cable TV households in the Los Angeles viewing area from 3 a.m. to 5 p.m., though not all cable systems carry it. KWHY broadcasts from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m.

KWHY, which can be seen by anyone in the Los Angeles area who can receive its UHF broadcast signal, distinguishes itself from FNN by adding a Southern California flavor to its financial coverage. “We focus on California companies,” Siebert says, “and our experts talk specifically about the impact these events might have on the economy of this area.”

Traditionally, programming on these channels has been filled with financial jargon directed at market insiders and hard-core investors. But the keen public interest in the stock market over the last few weeks and the public’s sudden awareness that stations like these actually exist, Krzyzanowski says, has encouraged FNN to make its broadcasts “more user-friendly.

“We are increasing the scope of our coverage,” she says. “We are now explaining the technical jargon and trying to use language that is accessible to everyone.”