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Fox to launch national morning show in 2007

Posted on: Tuesday, 18 July 2006, 15:56 CDT

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

Source: REUTERS

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