FNN Purchase Complete; Staffers Face Layoffs : Cable TV: About 250 people will lose their jobs as NBC closes its $145-million deal.

NBC’s Consumer News and Business Channel completed its $145-million purchase of Financial News Network late Tuesday afternoon and promptly moved to lay off most of FNN’s employees and combine the cable services’ operations.

About 250 of FNN’s roughly 300 employees will lose their jobs, including all but about 10 of the 170 who worked at the channel’s West Los Angeles production studio and offices. That facility will be closed immediately, along with a studio and offices in New York. The merged channel will be operated from CNBC headquarters in Ft. Lee, N.J.

The mood among FNN staffers, who continued to operate the financially ailing network while it sank into bankruptcy and finally was auctioned off to its main competitor, was said to range from anger to relief that the ordeal was finally over. It’s a mixture of “resignation and cynicism and bitterness,” said one news staffer in Los Angeles.

Beginning this morning, cable channels that had offered FNN will begin to carry a revamped version of CNBC, dubbed CNBC/FNN Daytime for its weekday business programming and CNBC Nighttime and CNBC Weekend in other time periods. The channel is expected to reach more than 35 million homes.

The merged channel will feature a handful of FNN reporters and anchors, along with elements such as the FNN stock ticker. But the programming is expected to be dominated, at least initially, by CNBC personnel and features.

According to executives at both networks, at least some of the planned layoffs and office closures at FNN are subject to the federal plant-closure law known as WARN, which requires that employees be given 60 days’ notice of a closure or receive 60 days’ pay if layoffs are effective immediately.

Representatives from both networks had been negotiating over the issue since late last week. CNBC asserted that it was not responsible for payments to laid-off FNN employees, saying, as a CNBC spokeswoman put it, “It’s an FNN issue.”

Laid-off FNN employees, in turn, hired a New York lawyer to press their interests in the dispute.

At least a partial settlement appeared to be reached late Tuesday, when FNN President Mike Wheeler confirmed that his company had agreed to offer 60 days’ pay to laid-off employees in Los Angeles--an amount totaling less than $1 million. He said the payments would not be made to New York employees, however, since fewer than 50 were fired at the executive offices and fewer than 50 at the production studio, which makes the facilities exempt from the WARN law.

FNN began its slide toward extinction last year after serious financial problems at the network were first disclosed and its chief financial officer left the company in a scandal. Debt-burdened FNN filed for bankruptcy protection on March 1.

CNBC, a unit of General Electric Co., carried out an extended bidding war for FNN against a partnership of Dow Jones & Co. and Westinghouse Broadcasting Co.

After both sides raised their bids several times, a bankruptcy judge in New York chose CNBC’s offer on May 9, and the Dow Jones-Westinghouse partnership announced last week that it would not pursue an appeal.