Fox Puts Its Money on 'Fun' Business Channel

Willard, an anchor who sports shoulder-length hair, says on the Web site that he feels like throwing his television out the window "when you hear the garbled 'The Dow futures are down 28 because oil is up 32 cents to $78 this morning.' . . . Does the reporter even believe it himself when he spews that nonsense?"

During the rehearsal, McDowell says things like "Tracy, whatcha got?," while graphics refer to the "Breaking Biz Desk."

Cavuto harks back to the 1996 launch of Fox News, when he would tell his staff not to lead off his show with whatever CNBC's big story was. But while few took Fox seriously at the time, he says, "there's a bit more pressure now because we're a far better-known organization."

Who is the target audience? "My wife is not a business news junkie at all," Cavuto says. "She's good at shopping for bargains, but she's not riveted by this stuff. I always think, how can I reach out to her, or to her mom?"

Perhaps the key intangible is whether the start-up channel can find the niche that Fox News did a decade ago, one that few thought existed at the time. By positioning his network as an alternative to the media establishment and dubbing it "fair and balanced," Ailes, a former Republican strategist, appealed to a largely conservative audience. His future stars, such as Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, were little known at the time.

But is there an audience that sees a political imbalance in financial coverage? Murdoch told a conference in February that the new channel would be "more business-friendly than CNBC," and Ailes told the New York Times that "many times I've seen things on CNBC where they are not as friendly to corporations and profits as they should be."

Fox executives say they cannot survive by simply stealing a slice of CNBC's audience. Instead, they say, they must attract viewers who haven't been drawn to business coverage.

"We'll make mistakes," Magee says. "We'll make lots of mistakes. We're starting a lot of shows from scratch. Some of them I hope will work, some of them I know won't."

But, he adds, "we don't want to be CNBC's little brother. We want our own look and feel."