Poor lighting. Dead space.
Empty/disorderly trading floors.
That wretched
archway. And curtain.
CNBC’s Post 9 NYSE set is a bust.
It starts with that archway over Carl Quintanilla's right shoulder.
Then, there is the often-stagnant/empty trading post.
Finally, there's the curtain, the television equivalent of bed sheets in apartment windows.
This is the apparent culmination of CNBC's grand NYSE endeavor of constructing at the old "Post 9" a floor-level studio that would theoretically capture and harness much of the day-to-day buzz of financial activity.
Instead, it only seems to capture scattershot views of a visually disorienting convention hall waning in relevance and unsure what it's supposed to be nowadays.
The visuals produced by this setup are a mess. Lighting seems imbalanced from virtually every angle, background depth is different from every camera, headache-inducing neon-lit screens clash with historic architecture. Visuals are filled either with empty space, or lots of junk.
The worst, most static look is the clash between the half-archway, half-trading-monitor (with too-tiny data except for various corporate names illuminated for seemingly no reason other than they're presumably listed on the NYSE) akin to "The Da Vinci Code" meets "Minority Report," as shown below behind Carl Quintanilla:
During some discussions, such as this chat below between Sue Herera and Bob Pisani, viewers get the kitchen sink — curtains just behind, the archway in the distance, corporate logos at various depths, a screen with tiny trading data, and a sizable "Power Lunch" logo.
CNBC set-builder "architect" Steve Fastook hailed the site's
unveiling in February, claiming, "This is the next step in our evolution ... puts us smack dab
into the middle of the trading floor. You can't get closer to the action than that.”
And what exactly constitutes "action" on a trading floor nowadays? Here below is a typical sighting of a mid-morning Art Cashin report, only 2 traders behind sitting around presumably not taking FB orders but talking football, and an unused dance floor (or something like that) behind Mary Thompson:
The faces seen on the trading floor nowadays less often tend to be actual stock-market specialists and more often tend to be celebrities or wandering passersby, who occasionally interrupt the TV commentary to cheer for no reason anyone can determine. The New York Post reported in May that the NYSE once boasted 3,000 traders; now 2,000 of them are gone. One retired broker says, "All these brokers for the big firms are still running around like crazy before the opening, and then they sit down all day — they don’t do anything."
Taking up the spaces as seen below are casts of hot TV shows and apparent tourists:
Given that there is virtually no spontaneous activity on the NYSE floor that merits cutting into the scheduled broadcast, the set accomplishes nothing by locating at the NYSE except to create distraction.
Innovation at CNBC tends to be limited to the latest prime-time programming plan. It took years just to get the Dow box on the screen, and who knows why the Dow and/or the S&P 500 ticker isn't a permanent fixture. The screen text outlining guest opinions is often not in sync with what the guests are saying, so provocative words at the bottom often go unaddressed in interviews. Any chart besides a 1-year stock chart tends to be problematic.
It's admirable to try to improve the visuals of financial reporting. The problem is that CNBC here is going backward. Instead of pioneering a new visual, the network has allocated a decent chunk of resources to a declining asset, the NYSE floor, which doesn't appear suitable for anything beyond the dysfunctional visuals viewers are getting now. The basics of television require attractive faces in what should at least be a competent setting. Post 9 doesn't even meet the standard of the No. 3-rated 6 p.m. newscast.
"I've been building sets forever," Fastook said. "But this is the most impressive thing I've ever
been involved with."
Whatever.
