'Make it great': Green's brief history of BNN

Founding anchor Howard Green looks back at the creation of Business News Network.

Sometime in 1996, I got a phone call from a fellow who'd once been my boss at the CBC business program Venture.  Duncan McEwan was now an executive at a satellite company called Cancom.  He was working with The Globe and Mail to put together an application to the CRTC for the establishment of a business television network in Canada.  It would be joined at the hip with The Globe and had been dubbed Report on Business Television.

I had been making documentaries and producing long form current affairs segments and Duncan wanted me to direct the video that would accompany the written submission to the CRTC.  I said sure.    

I plotted out a shooting plan, assembled a crew and shot for three days at The Globe and Mail, where countless grouchy business reporters were hunched over in their scuzzy cubicles.  A few of them were nice and cooperative, while for others we were a bother.  Most of them wanted nothing to do with television.  As the paper’s deadline approached, our gaffer plugged a light into the wrong circuit and blew out the power to the department’s computer terminals.  The Globies were not happy with us. 

This was the embryo of what is now BNN, Business News Network, which has just celebrated 10 years of broadcasting.

The Globe and Mail had two point men on the case.  A fine, supportive gentleman named Steve Petherbridge and a toothy American named Roger Parkinson who was publisher of the paper at the time.  

I recall a dinner of all those involved at which Parkinson, upon being introduced to the video director, looked me in the eye with all the verve of a U.S. college football coach and said, "Make it great!"

It was one of those inspiring lines made famous by the ranks of upper management, roughly equivalent to "don’t screw it up."   

Evidently, we did make it great because the licence was granted.  We beat out none other than Moses Znaimer, who was trying to get a business channel for his CITY-TV stable.  Among The Globe team, Znaimer’s application was known somewhat derisively as "Moses Does Money." 

What we all learned quickly, though, was that just because you had a licence, didn’t mean you could have a spot on the dial. It took three years for the cable companies to make room for the new channel, which in the course of a just a few months, sprinted onto the airwaves in September 1999.  The late Kenneth Thomson, then worth about $25 billion and at the time the owner of The Globe, came to our launch party at the TSX and introduced himself to everyone.  He wasn’t so interested in talking about the channel, but I remember telling him about how our dog, a miniature wirehaired dachshund, was small enough that we were permitted to put him under the seat on an airplane.  

Fascinated by animals, Thomson expressed amazement.  

"I didn’t know that.  My father always told me, 'Talk to people, you’ll learn something.'"

Before we had our own channel, we inched our way onto the airwaves via a series of 45 second newscasts that emanated from a broom closet at the newspaper.   There, armed with a computer, a camera and a self-driven teleprompter, a woman named Brenda Craig spat out 11 newscasts a day that were fed to CTV in Agincourt where they were replayed on the network’s new all-news channel. The content was terrible.  I know.  I did it a few days myself.  

Once we had our own channel, BNN or ROBTv as we called it then, also got off to a flimsy start.  We were so far up the dial -- channel 75 --no one knew we were there.  We were crammed into a dirty little office and studio at the enviable Toronto address of Jarvis Street, just south of Carlton.  Used condoms littered the driveway.  Pigeons got into the studio.  The investors had so much faith in the enterprise, they would only guarantee 4 months employment.  If it didn’t work by Christmas, they let us know they’d pull the plug.   

Fortunately, the channel was launched during a stock mania.  Anything with a dot-com attached to its name saw its shares go up just about every day.  The Nasdaq went to 3,000, then 4,000, then 5,000 in the first six months we were on the air.   Nortel shares were grooving right along with it. Within a year, that stock would hit its all-time high and never reach it again.  Curiously, the current age of BNN roughly spans the timeframe of Nortel’s meteoric rise and tragic disappearance.  
 
The early days of the network were awful. The boss, a TV veteran named Jack Fleischmann, would regularly scream at us. At two points during the day, we defaulted to what was then known as CNNfn, the Cable News Network’s financial channel, a poor competitor to CNBC.  It was closed down a number of years ago, but at the time, it was our saviour. We "pushed the CNN button" for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon, not to mention all the individual reports we ran throughout the rest of the day.

Our stock ticker was, at first, incomprehensible. Believe it or not, somebody designed it so you got the wrong impression about the direction of the market. Green arrows pointed down, red arrows pointed up or something counterintuitive like that.  For the first month, we found ourselves having to constantly explain to viewers how to read the ticker.  Not a good start.  It was soon revamped, the first of many times.  

Among the guests who braved our bacteria infested facility that first year were luminaries such as John Cleghorn, at the time the Chairman and CEO of Royal Bank.  I remember going to an RBC briefing, introducing myself and handing him my card.  He looked at it and laughed. Nonetheless, a few months later he made the trek and did an interview with me. Thank you, Mr. Cleghorn.  Another who did so was the always-gracious Issy Sharp of Four Seasons Hotels. If there could be a polar opposite to a Four Seasons Hotel, it was the first ROBTv studio of 1999-2000. Ironically, it was across the street from Sharp’s first hotel. He was warm-hearted enough to recognize the humour in the coincidence.  
 
Jim Balsillie of Research in Motion also dropped by for one of our first Power Breakfast interviews.  In his hand he clutched what appeared to be a pager, but with a tightly packed keyboard.  He made it clear, though, that what he held was not a pager. It was an early version of BlackBerry.  I recall RIM’s stock went up $20 a share that day, from about $60 to $80.   

Looking back, our graphics may as well have been out of the Stone Age. These days, everything is computerized, plug and play.  In the first year of what would become BNN, you had to scribble what you wanted on a Xeroxed piece of paper ---- 52 week highs and lows, for example -- and then run the paper into the control room where a guy furiously punched the information into an outdated system. His was the worst job in the place, the bottom of the drain.  

During much of this, I couldn’t help thinking, what have I done to my well-tended career? I’d given up working for some of the best programs anywhere to throw my lot in with this messy puppy of a TV station. What was I thinking?   

But by the year 2000 (Y2K was a big story for the channel), which arrived just four months after our launch, people were talking about us. By the following September, we were in a new studio, at the time, the most modern in the country. We had survived the investors’ cut off date.  

When 9/11 hit a year later, people were truly aware of us. That terrible day, we were getting emails from eyewitnesses in New York. We were hooking up with people all over the world to help viewers come to terms with the shock.  This was not only a human tragedy, but it had been directed at the centre of the financial world. Covering the business impact of a mass murder was a tricky line to walk, but we did it with taste and respect.   

In our first two years, between 9/11 and the tech implosion, we were coming of age. We were now getting a steady stream of  “A list” guests from across the financial and political worlds, something that has only intensified to this day.  

In the early years, though, you’d think no one wanted us. Duncan McEwan’s Cancom, later ingested by Call-Net (later acquired by Rogers), was a 20-percent shareholder in what was then called ROBTv.  The biggest shareholder, with 50 percent, was Ken Thomson.  The remaining 30 percent was held by a long gone firm called WIC, which owned independent channels around the country like CHCH in Hamilton, Ont. In a complicated exchange of assets, WIC later became part of CanWest and for a short period, Ken Thomson and Izzy Asper owned ROBTv 50-50.  We knew that couldn’t last.  The channel was soon folded into the CTV family, the bulk of which was bought by Bell Canada, then later bought back by the Thomsons, and other new shareholders Ontario Teachers Pension Plan and Torstar.                                                                                     

A few years ago, the owners decided the channel needed better branding and changed the name from ROBTv to BNN, short for Business News Network. Americans had called it "Rob TV," as in rob ‘em blind, which wasn’t so outlandish given the Enrons, Worldcoms and Hollingers. At times, during that string of white-collar cases, we jokingly referred to it as "Report on Crime Television."     

Now, 10 years on, BNN has become something of an institution, a go-to source for financial news and conversation about business and economics. When the financial crisis hit full force last fall, viewership spiked some 300 percent from a base that had been building for several years. Jack Fleischmann is still the boss and he screams a lot less than in the beginning.

To their credit, Ken Thomson and The Globe and Mail saw the potential for a business television network in Canada.  They hired the right guy in Duncan McEwan, who knew television, to write the application. And we went on to do what Roger Parkinson told us to do. We made it great.

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