thanks in large part to what appeared at the time to be a swifter
conclusion to the war than most had anticipated. We reported gold
and oil prices were moving sharply lower. We interviewed a top
economist from the World Bank who spoke about the economic impact
of a short war. We never ignored the key war-related events of the
day — we simply helped our core audience interpret the day’s events
and what it meant for their businesses and their investments.
Coverage Plans and Changes
Since the instinct of virtually any journalist, including our business
and financial news journalists, would be to cover the play-by-play
action of the war once it started, we wanted to ensure that, while we
provided war headlines to our viewers, we instead focused our
coverage on the unique needs of our audience. So, well before the
war began, we set out a very specific editorial agenda for the
newsroom to follow, and we discussed that agenda in numerous
newsroom and production meetings. We came up with the following
as our main focal points of coverage:
Impact of a war on European economies
Impact of a war on European financial markets – equity, oil,
commodities and currency markets
Implications of a war for CEOs who run European companies –
particularly companies with global investment interests
In-depth look at sectors that likely will be most affected:
defense, energy, travel, airlines, media
We reassigned some of our reporters to focus on key sectors like
airlines, defense and travel whereas before they were more generalist
stock market reporters. We made sure to cover many news conferences
live, especially when European leaders gave them. However, we
developed specific on-air graphics for these news conferences so
that while we carried them live, we also showed stock charts so we
could track real-time market reaction to these live events.
We even changed the way we booked guests. For example, we normally
booked CEO interviews pegged to companies’ earnings reports. In
the weeks since the war began, we looked to book CEOs of key sectors
to ask these business leaders how the war was affecting their plans.
We also booked more pan-European and global economists than under
traditional circumstances as they offered a truly broader perspective
of the economic implications of the war.
On our morning programme Squawk Box Europe, we usually had a
guest host from the financial services industry who joined us for the
full two hours of the show. In early April, we changed the type of
guest host that we’d normally book. The production team asked WPP
Group CEO Sir Martin Sorrell to appear as guest host for a day so that
he could comment on the overall and advertising and media sector’s
reaction to the war. (Note: the WPP Group is one of the world’s
biggest full service communications companies and owns ad agencies
including Ogilvy & Mather and J. Walter Thompson.)
Before the war began, CNBC Europe ran a two-line ticker that displayed
live, real-time stock quotes from 14 exchanges across Europe. After
the war began, we added a third line to the ticker that was text, not
live data – it included the latest headlines from the conflict in Iraq.
The addition allowed us to continue with CNBC Europe’s core business
and financial news coverage but keep up with the latest developments
in Iraq.
On-Air Branding
In the past decade, it has become standard operating procedure for
most 24-hour news networks to brand their coverage of major news
events. CNBC Europe, like other networks, branded our coverage –
we created a new graphics package and labeled our coverage
The
Cost of War.
We chose that name very carefully – we wanted our
viewers to know that our coverage of the war would indeed be different
from the general news networks by focusing on the economic and
financial impact of the conflict.
General news networks, on the other hand, branded their coverage
much more aggressively with names like
Operation Iraqi Freedom,
War on Iraq and Conflict with Iraq.
In most cases these networks also
introduced a dramatic music and graphics package as well. The
packages were brash, bold and created a specific message to their
audience: the war is
the story,
and that’s the entire focal point of
their coverage.
After the first two weeks of the war, we dropped
The Cost of War
branding while the general news channels kept theirs. We felt that
overt branding of the war for our core viewing audience was no longer
necessary.
At that point, we also introduced a new, branded segment called
Back to Business.
The implicit message of that branding was pretty
straightforward: we felt our viewers had had time to assess the initial
effects of the war, and that much of our audience would be re-
emphasizing the business and investment challenges facing them in
the context of the war and its aftermath.
As CEOs, business leaders, financial market professionals and investors
look ahead to the rest of 2003, war will continue to have an enormous
impact on just about every business and investment decision that
they make. The conflict also is likely to keep European stock markets
moving sharply in one direction or another on a nearly daily basis.
All of the above underscores the importance of CNBC Europe’s unique
coverage for its influential audience in these historic times.
Is that a B52?
Handling the war’s news
