Business News Network recently turned 10 years old and Howard Green has been looking back at the last decade since its launch.  Green, a founding anchor at the network, has been at the forefront of its development since its launch, and remains a key player both on air and behind the scenes. 

He starts his look-back by saying; "Sometime in 1996, I got a phone call from a fellow who'd once been my boss at the CBC business program Venture.  Duncan McEwan was now an executive at a satellite company called Cancom.  He was working with The Globe and Mail to put together an application to the CRTC for the establishment of a business television network in Canada.  It would be joined at the hip with The Globe and had been dubbed Report on Business Television."

Green then looks at the shakey early days for the fledgling network; "Once we had our own channel, BNN or ROBTv as we called it then, also got off to a flimsy start.  We were so far up the dial -- channel 75 --no one knew we were there.  We were crammed into a dirty little office and studio at the enviable Toronto address of Jarvis Street, just south of Carlton.  Used condoms littered the driveway.  Pigeons got into the studio.  The investors had so much faith in the enterprise, they would only guarantee 4 months employment.  If it didn’t work by Christmas, they let us know they’d pull the plug.  The early days of the network were awful. The boss, a TV veteran named Jack Fleischmann, would regularly scream at us. At two points during the day, we defaulted to what was then known as CNNfn, the Cable News Network’s financial channel, a poor competitor to CNBC.  It was closed down a number of years ago, but at the time, it was our saviour. We "pushed the CNN button" for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon, not to mention all the individual reports we ran throughout the rest of the day."

He finishes by saying; "Now, 10 years on, BNN has become something of an institution, a go-to source for financial news and conversation about business and economics. When the financial crisis hit full force last fall, viewership spiked some 300 percent from a base that had been building for several years. Jack Fleischmann is still the boss and he screams a lot less than in the beginning."

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