Nightly Business Report

Ordinary investors and experts in the Delaware Valley depend on this daily business news broadcast
By Thomas J. Walsh

The name of the show, Nightly Business Report, is indicative of the program itself: no nonsense, dependable and directly to the point.

Nightly Business Report, seen weeknights at 7 p.m. on WHYY TV12, celebrated 20 years of broadcasting daily stock and bond market recaps to a national audience in 2001, but the program actually started 23 years earlier on January 22, 1979. That evening, station WPBT in Miami, FL rolled out what has turned out to be nothing short of a pioneer program in business news broadcasting.

Nightly Business Report debuted as a 15-minute summary of local and national business news, co-anchored by WPBT news director Linda O'Bryon, managing editor Merwin Sigale and former stockbroker and small-time radio commentator Paul Kangas.

"The market was kind of crummy at the time anyway," Kangas recalls about his decision to leave his dozen years as a stockbroker behind for a career in television. "And I liked this challenge of business news. Lou Rukeyser was the only such program on at the time and that was weekly."

Like Louis Rukeyser's program Wall $treet Week, which airs Fridays at 9:30 p.m. on TV12 and has a faithful following of its own, Nightly Business Report has become a mainstay of the business community. Even with the explosion of cable television, the advent of seemingly non-stop coverage of the financial markets by networks such as CNBC and MSNBC and the birth and growth of the Internet, public television's Nightly Business Report is still head-and-shoulders above any individual television program geared toward coverage of the stock market.

The program is far from just a well-articulated stock ticker. Kangas and co-host Susie Gharib interview key market players and analysts and help produce special shows and series.

Kangas says that when he glances at the hard-news portion of the front page of The Wall Street Journal on the day after each broadcast, he is happy if 90 percent of the stories are ones that Nightly Business Report covered. He's usually happy, he says.

"Our format from day one has been the same -- to get out as much info as possible," says the affable Kangas. "The point is that we're something of an early warning system for people. If we can get people informed about a stock they may own, it will show them what's going on. The fact that we encapsulate the news for people that have to work during the day, that's our niche."

Locally, Nightly Business Report has been broadcast on TV12 for all of its two decades. For years, WHYY's newsroom in Wilmington, DE has provided local stock information during the nightly program.

In 2001, reporter Tracey Matisak contributed WHYY's first two business feature stories on Nightly Business Report. WHYY producer Patty Hartman says that the relationship is too new for there to be any sort of set schedule for future contributions, but the experience "has been great," she adds. "It's really allowed us to expand our horizons."

"What we've tried to strike here is a long-term agreement," says Paul Gluck, WHYY's vice president and station manager. "We recognize Nightly Business Report as one of the true authorities in business and financial news, and we believe that the story of business in America is very much the story of business in our region."

Nightly Business Report airs Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. on WHYY TV12.

A special Nightly Business Report recap of the day's financial activity can be seen immediately before Charlie Rose at midnight each weekday.