Broadcasting & Cable reports that a group of investors, including former FCC Commissioner Tyrone Brown, TIAA-CREF CEO Roger Ferguson, syndicated columnist Clarence Page, and former GE and NBC executive Paul Besson are backing the launch of a new African-American-targeted cable and satellite net, the Black Heritage Network (BHN).
Former WUSA-TV GM Richard Reingold, who will be CEO, likened the network to Fox News. But don't worry — that's only in the sense that it is targeting an audience he thinks is not currently being served.
BHN executives say they're in "serious" talks with the major distributors and expect to launch around December of this year. The content, which BHN describes as "life in the moment," will combine original programs with updated "classic material" (all of it reality or history programming rather than scripted). It will also run some classic movies with "cultural relevance." Reingold describes it as a mix of Discovery and History Channel, targeted at a "slightly older, educated, more affluent audience" than its competition. He calls its target "the upper end of the 25-54 African demo and 50-plus."
If this new network truly represents as much of a departure from BET as Fox did from mainstream news, African-American-targeted programming is set for a dramatic — and, for many, long overdue — change.
Read more at Broadcasting & Cable.
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