Fox launches business channel, CNBC and Bloomberg brace for impact

Its early this Monday morning and the new Fox business channel officially began airing at 4:00am. Now there is a new kid on the block for financial news media and my biggest problem is which channel will my television be locked on during the trading day.

CNBC and Bloomberg were the only other major business channels to watch in the past and it will be interesting to see the different programming formats that will lure viewers from one channel to the other. Hopefully this could be the end of watching late night infomercials and gameshows on CNBC or the continuous market scoreboards and scrolling tickers that made Bloomberg such a boring channel to stay tuned too.

So what can one or the other do to win the ratings game?

I miss the old days when CNBC (formerly FNN) would have guests like John Murphy, a well respected technical analyst, come on the program to highlight particular charting patterns and trends that helped me become a better technical analyst. I also miss the days of Dan Dorfman, who would highlight daily rumors and market events that would make stocks skyrocket or dive in a flash.

If any of these major networks focus not just on informing the investing public, but on actually educating investors, I believe this would be the missing ingredient that would set one apart from the rest. Many times I hear novice investors say "I don't understand anything that they are talking about, interest rates? Trade deficits? The value of the dollar?, What does this have to do with whether I should buy Google (GOOG) at $600 plus dollars per share?"

Financial TV has become just as much of an information overload, like the Internet, when it comes to the hundreds of differing opinions of what stocks and industry groups are at buying or shorting levels. Just once I would like one of these channels to set aside a time slot to explain to people actual fundamental analytics, financial planning techniques, portfolio management strategies or options strategies as a compliment to an overall investing plan. Many people are constantly told what the best stocks to buy are and why, but rarely do I see guests and analysts on these programs tell investors what to sell and the reason for their bearishness. Also, never do I see one of these market gurus say "Hey, I was wrong on this pick six months ago, but here is what I did to cut my losses and move on to the next episode."

That is the main conflict for these channels. The goal of providing news and information only without crossing the line into a third party advisory medium thereby drifting from complete objectivity and opening up liability questions resulting endless repetitive disclosure policy, is a fine line that these news providers must straddle. Today's viewer is just as much interested in what they should do in reaction to a market news event rather than just absorbing the event and letting the chips fall where they may, regardless of the impact to one's portfolio.

The future of the world of Financial news media will probably lie in an on-demand environment rather than a "shove it in your face, this is what is important" programming format. If an investor wants to know what to do about Google, it would be a better service so that when you enter GOOG into the search box, instead of a chart with company specific statistics and news headlines indexed by that stock symbol for the result, a listing of analyst interviews and opinions comes up related to that symbol or a listing of past trading strategies using that actual symbol would give investors a better overview of what move to make at any given time and what situations to avoid.

For now though, I will switch between both CNBC and Fox because they have the prettiest news anchors.