A New Video Strategy Could Salvage Fox Business News' Online Reputation

When I first heard that Fox (NWS) was coming out with a new business channel, Rupert Murdoch had me at “more corporate friendly.” Since CNBC seems to only cover the hype and Bloomberg is painfully boring, I was hopeful that Fox could provide a fresh perspective on business events, while still entertaining me with their bombshell anchors and their sensationalist style of reporting.

Unfortunately, Fox Business News has turned out to be a big joke and continues to lose credibility on Wall St. Since launching the channel, I’ve seen three of their stories go viral, but instead of giving me a reason why I should be tuning in, the stories have been about embarrassing gaffes by the channel.

The first story involved an anchor who incorrectly reported that Apple (AAPL) had purchased an 8% stake in AMD (AMD). Even after discovering the mistake, Fox compounded this error by misreporting that it was the “Arabs” who had purchased AMD instead.

A few days later, Fox followed up this viral hit with another blunder, after they rushed to report that HP (HPQ) had missed their earnings estimates, when in fact they had easily beaten them.

The latest story to hit the innerweb involves a man on the street interview with a planted shill from the National Retail Federation.

I don’t know why Fox is having so many problems getting their news right, but these types of stories are having a serious impact on their credibility. “Fair and balanced” may work for their political reporting, but when traders are betting millions of dollars on breaking information, they expect their news to be accurate.

While it’s easy to blame these PR errors on clumsy anchors, I think that Fox’s PR failings have more to do with their web video strategy. These may only be a few isolated events, but without positive buzz, it leaves people with the impression that Fox gets things wrong, more often than right. I don’t think that Fox can prevent future goof ups from going viral, but by making it easier for the web community to share their reporting, they could begin to repair their tattered reputation.

When it comes to premium content, it’s understandable that the studios would be reluctant to move it to the net, but when it comes to business news, it’s an entirely different animal. You don’t need to watch Heroes live, in order to extract value from the content, but breaking financial news isn’t the sort of thing that people time shift.

Because the information is time sensitive, it protects business channels from the DVR effect, but it also limits the monetary value of their archived content. Even though people won’t pay for a Squawk on the Street DVD box set, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t real marketing value locked up in the business news vaults.

The problem with Fox’s web video strategy, is that they are trying to control what goes viral, by only uploading certain highlights to their website. This might help to beef up the content on their site, but it doesn’t make the best use of their archived footage. I believe that the stock market is the ultimate example of the long tail in action. The large cap companies may get all the press, but there are an unbelievable number of companies out there and each one has an eager audience. By making it easier for the long tail community to easily share their reporting, I believe that Fox can strike a body blow against their CNBC rival.

Over the last year, Sling Media has been working on a clip and sling service, that would allow their customers to snip certain sections of a program and send them to people in their social network. Sling hasn’t released very many details on the software, but it’s already stirred up some controversy among some of the media companies.

Instead of fighting this technology, Fox should be using it as a weapon against CNBC. If Fox were to run a 20 minute delayed feed and let viewers clip and share the news within their social circles, they would soon have an army of volunteers creating a massive and valuable advertising platform for them. It may only be a 60 second clip talking about an obscure company, but that clip would get included in email groups, message boards and blogs, that are devoted to these subjects.

By running the news at a 20 minute delay, it would also encourage people to watch the channel live, so that they could then jump online to share the video. It would also help the home viewers have a better understanding of how breaking news impacts the markets. With most online quote services being 20 minutes delayed, sometimes it's hard to tell why a stock is jumping or falling without the live data. If home viewers had a way of syncing the business news with their delayed quotes, it could help them to make better sense of the trading activity in the markets. A 20 minute delay would also give Fox enough time to at least spin/correct any mistakes, before the bloggers jumped all over them.

Giving up this type of control can be scary for big media companies, but Fox has already lost control of their live video. If they have a major screw up, someone out there will take the time to get that footage onto YouTube because scandal sells and people love to gossip, but if they have an interesting interview with an exec, someone needs to be really motivated before they can share that content with their audience.

Instead of fighting this trend, Fox should accept that they can’t suppress live video and instead make it easier for people to share the good reporting that is also going on. Instead of limiting their videos to mainstream content, Fox should be opening up their programming to the entire web, so that they can leverage the marketing power of the content. When you only hear about the negatives, it’s hard to put a lot of value on Fox’s live coverage, but if people started to see content that was relevant to them, it would make them think about how they would have seen it live, if they were only watching Fox business instead.