“Nightly Business Report, ” the business newscast on PBS, laid off eight people on Friday, or about 20 percent of the staff, in the first major change since it was acquired in August by a new company, NBR Worldwide.
The layoffs at the half-hour daily program included several on-air faces, but not the anchors Susie Gharib and Tom Hudson, according to employees who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Gary Ferrell, executive vice president of operations and chief financial officer of NBR Worldwide, declined to say whether any on-air employees were included in the layoffs.
“These kinds of things are not ever fun and I wish that we didn’t have to do it,” Mr. Ferrell said in an interview from Miami, where the program is based. He added that, “This is really not
about cutting costs as much as it is repositioning resources,” both topically and geographically.
The program this week announced the opening of a bureau to cover Silicon Valley, in partnership with KQED Public Media, which owns KTEH-TV, the public television station in San
Jose, Calif. Mr. Ferrell said the program was in talks with several other public television stations to open similar bureaus around the country.
NBR Worldwide, whose chairman and chief executive is Mykalai Kontilai, acquired the 31-year-old program from Miami public television station WPBT-TV in mid-August, for an undisclosed price.
In recent weeks, the program has added sports business reports from Rick Horrow and environmental reports in partnership with George Washington University’s Planet Forward multimedia project.
“We’ve known from the time that we acquired the property that we needed to continue to not only modernize and refresh the look and feel of the show but also to expand the types of business topics that we cover,” Mr. Ferrell said.
Early this year, before the change in ownership, “Nightly Business Report” began revamping its on-air look, and those changes will continue, Mr. Ferrell said, with new graphics to be introduced in coming weeks.