CNN's ailing financial network, CNNfn, will finally be put out of its misery in mid-December. The New York-based network, started nine years ago, has traditionally been trounced in the ratings by both Bloomberg Television and CNBC.

CNNfn is only available in about 30 million of the nation's 110 million television homes. With the coming expiration of its deal with the DirecTV satellite system, it faced the prospect of losing more distribution.

It began in December 1995 when business, and business news, was hot. CNBC's ratings plunged when the Internet bubble burst on Wall Street, and CNNfn failed to gain footing, too.

Management turmoil didn't help: CNNfn's biggest star, Lou Dobbs, left in 1999 and then returned in 2001. He'll continue his program on the main network. CNNfn also announced in 2001 that it was changing the network's name to CNN Money, but the idea was dropped after a management change.

It recently shifted focus away from Wall Street toward personal finance. Two of its programs — the real estate series "Open House" and "Dolans Unscripted," a talk show with personal finance experts Ken and Daria Dolan — will move to the main network.

Headline News will soon offer actual prime-time programming, as opposed to its ongoing thirty-minute "newsradio" type of newscast.

Posted by: mhking at 10:21 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 240 words, total size 2 kb.