The Changing World of the Money Honey

Earlier this week, Verizon removed the Weather Channel from its FiOS TV lineup, saying that the channel was no longer necessary now that “customers are increasingly accessing weather information not only from their TV but from a variety of online sources and apps.” Who needs weather programming when it’s on-demand on your phone anywhere? And with that, the channel was gone — a “decision, not a dispute,” as a spokesperson called it.

Maria Bartiromo saw a similar dynamic playing out when she was at CNBC, where for 20 years she was the face of business news, grilling executives about earnings misses as a ticker scrolled beneath her. She had been at the cutting edge in how the markets were covered: the first reporter to broadcast from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, the first to report what the banks were saying in their morning calls. But by 2013, she realized that a major shift had occurred — and wasn’t sure why no one was admitting it.

The issue: the markets had turned mobile and ever-present, with everyone checking on stocks from wherever they were, not from the scrolling ticker. She wasn’t riding this trend, she was being asked to ignore it. Her managers, she says, wanted her to put more people on screen and for less time — focus on sound bites, give the audience even more of what they used to love, but faster.

“I felt that we were programming to the trading desk, programming to the knee-jerk reaction,” she says. “That worked. It worked really well in the '90s, because that's what was the environment… Today, there's a lot of information out there. And you really do not need more talking heads saying the same thing.”

Bartiromo decamped to Fox, where she became the global markets editor and a constant presence. She hosts the morning show every weekday on Fox Business News and a Sunday morning show on Fox News. The days start early and the only day off is Saturday. So while the shows are slower paced with more interviews — “more perspective, and more analysis,” she says — her pace hasn’t done anything but increase. (So far, the style has been enough to keep the show in the top 120 of cable news shows, but not enough to top her old network.)

After one morning’s show, she dropped by LinkedIn to talk about the changes all around her. Changes to her career and to the business world since she started covering it.

One of the things that I was most interested in was how she — and her sources — were dealing with the political and cultural forces that had been moving Wall Street out of the spotlight since the financial crisis. Bank CEOs were once business rockstars and MBA career centers couldn’t ship grads to banks fast enough. Then the mood in the country changed. Speed, entrepreneurism and tech know-how were still celebrated traits — maybe even more so now. But no one wants that culture in finance. Banks should be boring.

(And Wall Street has moved to change its DNA, too. When Bloomberg Businessweek recently polled 1,300 finance-industry recruiters on what they were looking for in applicants, 75% said communications skills were at the top of their list. At the bottom? Entrepreneurship and initiative/risk-taking.)

For her, it was just another reason why the sound bite culture was out-of-step with the times. For the last 5 years, as Wall Street has been deleveraging and moving away from risk, day-to-day trades have become less important than what she calls “the broader implications of money.”

“I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and it also has implications for the way we're educating our kids and the skill sets that are required for the new jobs of tomorrow,” she says. “You know, I don't know if Wall Street guys out there are feeling like, ‘Oh, God, I'm no longer the cover boy,’ you know? "I'm no longer, you know, in the headlines.”

Instead, she says, what they think about is how to keep attracting talent. And in that, case, it’s not by being cowboys, but by promising rewarding careers. “Students today really are looking for not just a successful job financially," she says. “They also want to have purpose, and they want to do something that actually makes them feel good.”

Wall Street will figure out how to change with the times — just as she has. Check out the full interview above and watch for more excerpts coming soon.

Note: I edited the paragraph about business culture per feedback from Edward Perkins — see his comment below.