Fox to launch national morning show in 2007
By Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The hosts of Fox News Channel’s
“DaySide” program will jump to a new morning show next year on
35 Fox-owned broadcast stations, going up against the last hour
of NBC’s “Today” in some cities, Fox said on Tuesday.
The new program, produced by sister studio Twentieth
Television, will air live from New York featuring a mix of
talk, news and entertainment hosted by Mike Jerrick and Juliet
Huddy of “DaySide.”
Jerrick and Huddy will continue their duties as Fox News
daytime anchors until this fall, when they will be replaced on
the cable news channel by another program.
Bob Cook, president and CEO of Twentieth Television, said
the pair’s new show on the Fox Television Stations group would
be similar in format to “DaySide,” but “we’ll bring a little
bit different look to it.”
Their as-yet untitled show is set to debut in January and
run from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. weekdays in most markets,
overlapping the last hour of NBC’s top-rated morning show
“Today” in some East Coast cities, the News Corp. Inc.-owned
companies said.
ABC’s No. 2 breakfast-time program “Good Morning America”
and CBS’s third-ranked “The Early Show” each currently end
their two-hour broadcasts at 9 a.m., so the new Fox show will
not compete with them.
Cook insisted the Jerrick-Huddy show was designed not as
Fox’s answer to the Big Three morning offerings, but rather as
a companion program to local news shows that are already
delivering strong ratings for Fox stations from 8 a.m. to 9
a.m.
“It’s more about the fact that we thought Mike and Juliet
had extraordinary chemistry and we thought they had earned this
opportunity and were a perfect fit for our television
stations,” Cook told Reuters.
Fox Television Stations broadcast group consists of 35 TV
stations in 26 markets reaching nearly 45 percent of U.S.
homes.
Cook said the new morning show may be expanded in the
future to the Fox broadcasting network as a whole or be
syndicated to other station groups.
Reuters/VNU