Financial News Network

Financial News Network
Screen caption of channel logo
Launched	1981
Closed	21 May 1991 (1991-05-21)
Owned by	Rodney Buchser, Dr. Glen H. Taylor and Merrill Lynch (1981–1991) CNBC (1991)
Picture format	480i (SDTV)
Country	United States
Language	American English
Broadcast area	United States
Affiliates	See Below
Headquarters	Santa Monica, California, later Rockefeller Center and Los Angeles, California
Replaced by	CNBC
Sister channel(s)	SCORE

The Financial News Network was a finance and business news television network that operated throughout the United States during the 1980s. The channel was bought by and merged with CNBC in 1991.

Financial News Network (FNN) was founded in 1981 by two men: Rodney Buchser, who had been general manager of KWHY in Los Angeles, and Dr. Glen H. Taylor. The concept originated in New York City via a Newark, New Jersey UHF independent TV station in 1975 on Blonder-Tongue Broadcasting WBTB-TV CH 68 (now WFUT) when Eugene Inger, a registered investment adviser, started his daily Wall Street programming in the fall of 1975 (known as Wall Street Perspective at that time). Keith Houser, the station's general manager, negotiated with the New York SEC office to get the ticker tape to crawl across the bottom of the screen with a two-hour delay, due to the SEC worrying that it might "destablize" the market. The ticker ran across the lower third of the screen, with stock prices on the top (white) band and index prices on the bottom (blue) band. After the first year of programming the SEC permitted just a twenty-minute delay.

KWHY was the first West Coast TV station to offer daily market news accompanied by a digital stock ticker "crawl" at the bottom of the screen. Los Angeles traders and investors could stay on top of market action without subscribing to an expensive stock quotation service. Computers at that time could not keep up with the full stock feed and as such, the ticker could only show preselected stocks, making the system highly manual and clumsy. The first fully automated stock ticker to appear on television was in 1996 on the CNNfn network.

With the earlier launch of CNN by Ted Turner blazing the trail, and subsequent to a 1975 article published by TV Guide of the Gene Inger success in NYC, Taylor & Buchser realized that newly available technology made possible the marriage of KWHY's live market reporting with on-screen quotes and the concept of national news via satellite. The early history of FNN was not highly profitable and, within a few years, Buchser severed his relationship with the fledgling network to launch a financial marketing services firm called FMS Direct. In its early years, FMS Direct produced infomercials and direct response television spots which more often than not, ran on FNN, the network he had helped to found. Harvey "Scott" Ellsworth, who was the creator and on-air host of the popular radio program Scott's Place, which aired on KFI-AM in Los Angeles from 1967 through 1974 IMDB Bio, was one of FNN's initial anchors.