There was an FBN employee party tonight at Rosie O’Grady’s. Not much in the way of details yet. I know Cavuto was there along with other anchors and EPs. The bar was open and the food was free. Peter Barnes did karaoke. If anyone should be feeling generous, video may be emailed to insidecablenews@gmail.com…

This isn’t to be confused with the upcoming FBN party to be held at the NYC Museum with Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes.

Update: An emailer adds that Rosie’s was rented out from 5-9 but the party went on past that. The gung-ho vibe that one would get at a start-up was felt throughout the room amongst the 300 or so people who were there. Money for Breakfast’s Elizabeth MacDonald joined Peter Barnes in the karaoke arena. Nicole Petallides was whooping it up on the dance floor with her NYSE team. But the big buzz was swirling around the dance moves of FBN’s Senior Vice President of Operations Brian Jones…

The Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Michael E. Kanell writes about Jim Cramer visting Georgia Tech College of Management on Thursday…

Jim Cramer charged into the courtyard of the Georgia Tech College of Management like he was taking the field in a showdown against the Dawgs — at least that’s what you might guess from the reaction of the crowd on the hastily constructed set.

They stood and cheered. They reached out to slap palms. They responded to even the smallest encouragement with roars of “Boo-yah!!!”

Cramer, host and star of the CNBC show “Mad Money,” is treated like a hometown hero, a favorite rock star, an especially excitable Hollywood boy. Yet he is twice the age of the students around him, a rich man talking to wannabes. He has journeyed from Jersey to Atlanta on Thursday to talk about… the stock market.

His show is something of a phenomenon. On a network seemingly aimed at buttoned-down, serious, grown-up folks who run American businesses, Cramer is in a category by himself.

It’s two minutes to Fast Money’s airtime and all systems are go. Well, almost…

“I’m not getting my IFB!”, notes Fast Money host Dylan Ratigan. “No problem. We’ve got time!” is the response that comes back. “We’ve got time…”

40 seconds to air. Ratigan calls an audible. “No IFB. I have your call!” as he points to Floor Manager Brad Rubin.

It’s showtime…

(more…)

CNN put up a countdown clock to Planet in Peril’s premiere. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Countdown clocks are routinely abused and misused.

Update: Note the green CNN logo. I think some broadcast folks at Rockefeller Center are probably calling the cops to report a theft…

New York’s Daily Intelligencer just loves FBN…

Rupert Murdoch’s new cable channel ran multiple segments on gold in its first week, which we thought was a little weird. But after we watched the hundredth paid advertisement for gold (damn watching TV in real time!), we thought, maybe it makes sense. If your sponsors are talking about it, why shouldn’t you? Anyway, you may be wondering how on earth we happened to notice something like that. It’s because we have been watching FBN every day, ALL WEEK. Yes! We love Alexis Glick, Neil Cavuto, and their motley crew of optimism pirates. They’re irresistible (especially young NYSE floor reporter Nicole Petallides, who makes rival Maria Bartiromo look like the Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy) and their financial joy is maddeningly, confusingly infectious. After the jump, our other favorite FBN moments from a week of watching.

The St. Petersberg Times’ The Buzz has a brief interview with FNC’s Carl Cameron ahead of this Sunday’s Florida debate. Separately, on FoxNews.com, Cameron blogs about the debate with behind the scenes video…

“We’ve reached a point where all the candidates have stood on a debate stage and to varying degrees have mastered their own talking points and slogans and rhetoric and their punch, counter punch points. Now that we’re in the post-September sprint, we’re 11 weeks away from Iowa and New Hampshire and the candidates know that time is going to be moving very quickly. This is an important opportunity to define themselves and not be defined by their rivals. The stakes are incredibly high.”

Cable News Daily Ratings for October 18, 2007

P2+ Total Day
FNC – 791,000 viewers
CNN – 483,000 viewers
MSNBC – 241,000 viewers
CNBC – 205,000 viewers
HLN – 255,000 viewers

P2+ Prime Time
FNC – 1,534,000 viewers
CNN – 862,000 viewers
CNBC- 409,000 viewers
MSNBC –269,000 viewers
HLN – 405,000 viewers

25-54 Total Day
FNC – 214,000 viewers
CNN – 168,000 viewers
MSNBC – 80,000 viewers
CNBC – 57,000 viewers
HLN- 104,000 viewers

25-54 Prime Time
FNC – 359,000 viewers
CNN – 278,000 viewers
MSNBC – 138,000 viewers
CNBC – 89,000 viewers
HLN – 139,000 viewers

Morning programs P2+ (25-54)
FOX & Friends – 752,000 viewers (273,000)
American Morning- 381,000 viewers (173,000)
Morning Joe – 205,000 viewers (76,000)
Robin & Co. – 245,000 viewers (133,000)
(more…)

CNN announced a special online section devoted to it’s upcoming Planet in Peril mega-documentary…

CNN.com, in conjunction with the CNN Worldwide investigation Plant in Peril, has created an online destination to enable users to go beyond the headlines and into more than a dozen countries directly affected by imminent environmental changes around the world.

The Planet in Peril special section, found at http://www.CNN.com/PlanetinPeril/, presents a “first look” at the ground-breaking documentary with subsections dedicated to the program’s four main environmental issues: climate change, over population, species loss and deforestation. The section also provides exclusive behind-the-scenes footage, production team commentary, virtual maps of the planet’s “hot spots,” green tips, the latest environmental headlines and moving documentary photography.
(more…)

Broadcast Engineering writes about the nuts and bolts technology behind FBN…and teases about FNC moving towards an HD launch…

While having a recently upgraded digital HD router, an existing audio and video infrastructure and general newsgathering procedures in place made the 180-day project somewhat easier, it wasn’t without its challenges, said Greg Ahlquist, senior network director and project manager of the digital newsroom integration for FNC and FBN.

The biggest challenge had to do with signal conversion and audio de-embedding and embedding issues, he said. “To have [FNC SD and FBN HD] co-exist for the transition, it seemed like there was always the challenge of forgetting that one little piece of the chain going toward fulfillment or a remote,” he said. “We’d think through the design as closely as we could, and there would be a gotcha here and there. I think when you are making the transition, those are a lot of the challenges that exist.”

With FBN up and running in HD, News Corp. has begun exploring doing HD at FOX News, he said. “We are full speed ahead. It’s tough living in both worlds. I don’t think it is an opportunity to pause,” Ahlquist said.

The National Review’s Stephen Spruiell writes about FBN’s first week on the air and interviews Neil Cavuto…

“By and large I guess I’m satisfied,” Cavuto says of FBN’s first week. “Of course, there were the little things — momentary lapses, freeze-frames, and that sort of thing, but… we’re keeping up our energy, which to me is the most important thing.”

When asked if he plans on making any big changes after week one, he adds, “I think the network is screaming for the Neil Cavuto Variety Show myself, but so far that’s fallen on deaf ears.”

Right now, FBN’s main competitor, CNBC, is available on 90 million screens — three times as many as FBN. “It is a concern of mine,” Cavuto says. “We’re in a third as many homes as CNBC. It has twice as many people, and it’s been doing this for two decades, so we are David against Goliath here.”

E Online’s Marc Malkin blogs about Anderson Cooper’s “roughing it” for Planet in Peril…

“What I really learned is you actually have to go into nature to report on the environment, which is sort of annoying because I really don’t like nature very much,” Cooper said last night at a Netflix-hosted preview of the series at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. “And to be with Jeff Corwin, who really does seem to enjoy it, was a little disconcerting.”

The 40-year-old anchor tried to share Corwin’s enthusiasm. “He would literally go off at 2 a.m. in the middle of the Brazillian rainforest with nothing more than a flashlight on his head, and I would trudge after him with a little video camera and also a much weaker flashlight,” Cooper said. “But after about three nights, I realized that was my idea of hell, because there are things you have never seen before flying around and hitting me in the face. Jeff would be like, ‘Oh my god, look, it’s the pygmy tree frog!’ and, literally, the frog would jump onto his face. That is my idea of hell…I did about three nights of it, but then I was like, ‘No more!’”

The Gothamist blogs about visiting Fox and Friends…

We recently visited Fox News Channel’s morning show Fox & Friends. Unlike most of the other morning shows it is a freewheeling kind of crazy romp that definitely has “Fox attitude”.

We don’t know if that “Fox attitude” is what gives a different on-set vibe compared to other news sets, but it did seem like less of a precision military operation than their competition at the Today Show. It could be that the show is unscripted, so the anchors are thinking on their feet making the show seem more organic than other shows (which are almost all tightly scripted).

Another differentiating characteristic is its interactive component: Viewers e-mail, call in and become a part of the show, and the people outside the studio are “bit players,” too. They average about 1000 e-mails per day and the anchors log on during the breaks to get instant feedback on what they’ve done.

A couple of weeks ago, I noted that CNBC’s Mark Hoffman would keynote PaidContent.org’s Future of Business Media. However, I missed the news that FNC/FBN’s Neil Cavuto would also be appearing at the conference in a Q&A…

In the timing-is-everything department … as the Fox Business Network launches Monday, we’re very pleased to announce that Neil Cavuto will be joining us for a lunch Q&A at our Future of Business Media conference Oct. 30 at the Waldorf=Astoria in New York City. More after the jump…

Cavuto is Senior Vice President, Anchor & Managing Editor of Business News for Fox News; he oversees all business coverage for FNC and FBN and serves on the network’s executive committee. He anchors FNC’s one-hour daytime financial program, Your World With Neil Cavuto every weekday and the weekly Cavuto On Business on Saturdays. In addition, he’ll be on the air for FBN. He’s going to take time out of this hectic schedule to talk with us during lunch in the famed Starlight Room. On the menu: how Cavuto and friends plan to make News Corp.’s (NYSE: NWS) major investment in the new business channel pay off, how they define competition and where Dow Jones (NYSE: DJ) might fit in.

Wednesday night Bill O’Reilly had a huge demo, his 8th largest of 2007 with 622,000 viewers.

8PM - P2+ (25-54)
O’Reilly Factor- 2,651,000 viewers (622,000) LSD: 2,714,000 viewers (656,000)
Out in the Open –573,000 viewers (162,000) LSD: 575,000 viewers (164,000)
Countdown w/ Olbermann- 912,000 viewers (277,000) LSD: 990,000 viewers (332,000)
Fast Money- a scratch with 107,000 viewers (a scratch with 37,000) LSD: a scratch with 111,000 viewers (a scratch with 40,000)
Nancy Grace – 478,000 viewers (235,000) LSD: 478,000 viewers (235,000)

What makes this particularly interesting is that it wasn’t done with any big name special guest or topic to pull viewers in. People just showed up en masse for what amounted to your basic everyday Factor episode.

Update: I was in a hurry and attributed this to last night. It actually happened Wednesday…

FBN anchor Liz Claman’s exclusive interview with Warren Buffett will air as an hour-long special on FBN this weekend. It is scheduled to air at 8pm ET and Midnight ET on Saturday and 6pm and 11pm ET on Sunday.

Buffett’s comments on on the Brazil real, why he sold his stake in PetroChina, and his belief that homebuilders haven’t hit the bottom yet had Wall Street buzzing. But the FBN interview also made waves at CNBC which was running headlines from the interview on Closing Bell. CNBC did credit FBN for the interview in its lower thirds.

Johnny Dollar has the audio from today’s Brian and The Judge radio program where Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace previews this weekends debate and talks about Pete Stark and Chris Matthews…

The News Hole has taken the wraps off of a new graphics/open for Countdown when it begins broadcasting from 30 Rock next week and put stills from it on their site (the above is one of them). Looks kinda Star Wars meets The Matrix…

FNC will be airing “Inside Islam: Faith vs. Fanatics” on Saturday, October 20th at 9pm ET… (via TVNewser)

After viewing the film PBS executives in charge of the “America at a Crossroads” series told the filmmakers that it was “alarmist” and “overreaching” and that PBS would not run it.

Burke and Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official, said that they made a series of changes to accommodate PBS. Ultimately, however, they concluded the problem wasn’t their film, but liberal bias at PBS.

In an interview with FOX News, Burke makes explosives charges about the PBS executives he dealt with, Jeff Bieber and Leo Eaton.

“In the first meeting, they said to me, ‘Fire your partners.’” Burke said. “And I said ‘Why?’ They said, ‘Because they are conservatives.’”

Burke said the PBS executives most forcefully objected to Gaffney’s involvement, asking, “‘Don’t you check into the politics of the people you work with?’ I said ‘No. I never have and I never will.’

FTVLive reports via “CNBC insiders” that Liz Claman’s announcement of the Warren Buffett interview yesterday reverberated throughout Englewood Cliffs because it was the first time CNBC got beaten out by FBN for a major interview with a big name.

Marketwatch’s Jon Friedman writes about Liz Claman joining FBN…

As if the CNBC-Fox Business Network rivalry needed any more gas on the flame, Liz Claman joined Fox on Thursday, following months of speculation that the former CNBC star would climb aboard the FBN train.

Claman brings with her plenty of star appeal. See related column. Viewers of CNBC appreciated her optimism, cheerfulness and journalistic instincts. Claman personifies credibility in the business-news arena, and Fox needs every bit it can muster as it launches this network.