The Revolution Will Be Televised (on CNBC)

She's up at 5 AM, reading newspapers, calling the premarket exchanges to find out what's moving. From 8 AM to 10 AM, she does 10 live reports from the stock exchange in lower Manhattan. Then she drives across the George Washington Bridge to CNBC's studios, in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where she's the lone anchor at CNBC for an hour starting at 2 PM, and then a coanchor at 5 PM -- for which she has written a market-wrap story.

When she gets off the air at 6 PM, Bartiromo ends her studio day sitting in a corner, talking to CNBC/Asia anchors in Tokyo, where it's 6 AM-- the next day.

Although Bartiromo is surrounded by technology -- computers, fax machines, wireless mikes, remote-control cameras -- her life would make sense to any grizzled wire-service reporter from half a century ago. CNBC's space at the NYSE is the size of a guest bedroom -- desks, computers, TV monitors, stool in front of a camera, one window overlooking the floor of the exchange. Bartiromo's desk in Fort Lee is like the desk of every other CNBC reporter or anchor -- one-third of a cubicle pod, stacked with papers. (Not even show producers have offices.)

In the morning, Bartiromo wants fresh news for her viewers every 10 minutes. It doesn't need to be gracefully written or dramatic, but it had better fit the basic definition of news -- something "new," something that she didn't say 10 minutes earlier. "I'm looking for different stories, different scoops," she says. "I want to give people something different in each segment."

One way that Bartiromo does that is by having cracked the big retail brokerages' "morning call" -- which took her seven years to accomplish. Every morning, the major players (Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrete [DLJ]; Goldman Sachs; Lehman Brothers; Merrill Lynch; Morgan Stanley Dean Witter; Salomon Smith Barney) hold a morning conference call with thousands of their brokers and money managers across the country. Each firm wants to tell its brokers about new research, about stocks that in-house analysts have upgraded or downgraded, about new information that the brokerages may have gotten from company managers. The brokers are then turned loose on their clients, and if, say, Merrill Lynch is pushing Global Crossing, or Lehman Brothers is talking up cell-phone makers Nokia and Motorola -- well, you can bet that such information will have an impact on the stock prices of those companies in the first half hour of trading.

The information discussed during those morning calls falls into an odd category. For one thing, it's more opinion and analysis than news. But opinions and analyses move stocks as much, if not more, than news. Also, the information is not public until the brokerage houses release it. But when 10,000 employees hear something, and they start telling their clients, it's hardly a secret. At the same time, clients of DLG or Merrill or Morgan Stanley -- some big institutions, some retail customers -- are paying for that kind of information and for those opinions, paying for the chance to act first.

With a classic reporter's snort, Bartiromo waves all that away.

"I try to give my viewers a leg up. Every major firm has a morning call, and my goal is to get it before it's distributed to clients so that I can tell my viewers about it first, so that the individual has it first."

Bartiromo was the first TV reporter to stand on the floor of the stock exchange and report live, but her real pioneering is in cracking the calls. "About five years ago, I had a great contact at a major firm. He said to me, 'I want our morning call out, and I want it out accurately.' That one call turned into two, three, and four calls. Suddenly, interest exploded."

Those firms were in a tough spot: Information that they wanted kept secret was leaking out, but along the way, CNBC was giving those firms credibility by airing their views. Bartiromo uses a classic reporter's lever: The more she knows, the more people talk to her -- and the more people feel that they have to talk to her, or be left out.

This is a piece of the democratization of information (and of markets) that includes
401(k)s, $8 stock trades, and chat rooms devoted to even the most obscure stocks. Bartiromo doesn't fret about what people do with the information that she provides. Her role is to get it and to get it out. And in doing that, she provides a service to ordinary folks that didn't exist 10 years ago.

Bartiromo is so passionate about getting fresh information on the air that, back in New Jersey, during her 2 PM stint as anchor of Street Signs, she makes 8 or 10 calls during commercial breaks from CNBC's anchor desk so that she'll have something new at the end of the hour for her Midday Call segment.

"Information is moving so fast that providing this services puts an individual on the same playing field as a professional," Bartiromo says. "Why can't Joe Smith who works at a deli have the same information as Joe Smith who works at an investment bank?

"That's why it's a bull market," she continues. "It's not a professional's game anymore. The reason why individuals are becoming more powerful has to do with their access to information."