CNBC taps Goldfarb
Exec fills syndie chief slot
The first two TV series that Goldfarb will oversee are the weekly half-hour "Wall Street Journal Report," which will shift its operations from the Journal's New York studios to CNBC's facilities in Fort Lee, N.J., and the daily half-hour "This Morning's Business," which Paramount TV now distributes.
Goldfarb will also take over responsibilities for CNBC Radio, a joint venture of CNBC and Westwood One, which provides radio stations with business news updates twice an hour, 24 hours a day.
"Business news is sexy these days," says Goldfarb, whose most recent job was president, worldwide advertising sales, Fox Kids Worldwide. "For the first time in history, the American people have more money invested in stocks than they do in real estate."
His mandate, Goldfarb says, is "to expand the distribution of CNBC programming to the broadcast marketplace, including PBS, and even to other cable networks."
Other sources said the new CNBC division could be the first step in an overall strategy by NBC to create a full-service TV syndication company, which would distribute entertainment programs produced by the network for its primetime schedule.
NBC is the only network that hasn't set up its own syndication division. ABC uses its parent company Walt Disney's Buena Vista TV arm; CBS formed Eyemark Entertainment a few years ago; and the Fox network and Twentieth TV both are divisions of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
After getting pulverized by the staggering cost of renewing Warner Bros. TV's "ER" -- the license fee shot up from less than $3 million an episode to $13 million an hour, starting in the fall of 1998 -- NBC said it would produce more of its primetime lineup inhouse. If NBC comes up with a big hit, sources say the last thing it would want to do is sell the distribution rights to an outside syndicator.
"The Wall Street Journal Report," now in its 16th year of production, with Consuelo Mack as the anchor, clears 190 TV stations covering about 90% of the U.S. "This Morning's Business" runs on 150 stations reaching about 80% of the country.
CNBC's pickup of the production and distribution of "Wall Street Journal Report" is part of the alliance announced two months ago between NBC and Dow Jones to produce business programming worldwide. Dow Jones is the publisher of the Wall Street Journal.
Goldfarb's previous jobs have included executive VP of syndication advertiser sales and programming for New World in 1996, and senior VP of syndication sales for Turner Broadcasting sales in 1990.
