The New York Times – WITH the re-signing this week of Bill O’Reilly, the most successful host in cable news, to a four-year deal worth more than $10 million a year, the Fox News Channel is starting to resemble the New York Yankees.
The channel has sewn up a full lineup of politically outspoken heavy hitters, and the salaries have been eye-popping. Last November, Shepard Smith, the channel’s main news anchor, landed a deal worth a reported $8 million a year; earlier this month, Sean Hannity signed on with Fox News until 2012 in what was described as a multimillion-dollar deal. And the channel scored a coup when it lured another conservative voice, Glenn Beck, from CNN’s Headline News, with another multiyear, multimillion-dollar contract.
Now all Fox News has to do is pay for all that.
A chunk of that cash will be expected to come from advertising, and that’s where Fox might have some cause for worry. Not only is the television news business anticipating a falloff in ads after the intense surge that has accompanied the presidential election this year, but the stumbling national economy, which has pounded many reliable television advertisers — auto companies, for example — is now expected to cut deeply into ad revenue all over television in the next year.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/business/media/23adco.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.