Linda O'Bryon

The notion of a daily business report on television seems obvious now, but it wasn't in 1979, when Ms. O'Bryon helped start the Nightly Business Report on Miami's WPBT2.

It broke all the rules for TV success: It focused on business news, it beamed from Miami on public television, it featured unknown anchors (Ms. O'Bryon and Paul Kangas among them) and it ran on a tiny budget.

Yet it quickly expanded from 15 minutes to a half-hour, then in 1981 started a great expansion that eventually reached 275 PBS stations, available to 95 percent of U.S. households.

At first amateurish, NBR called in pros from the big networks to shape it up for a national audience, but Ms. O'Bryon gets credit for making it work and making it last. "We wondered how we were going to fill 15 minutes with business news," she says. "Now we wonder how we'll pack it all into 30 minutes."

The program pulled in big sponsors and hit precisely the affluent audience for viewer-supported public television sought by PBS managers.

With viewer interest in business at an all-time high, just like the stock market (the Dow was at 838 when NBR began) NBR has generated competition from muscled cable outlets such as CNN and CNBC. Still, thanks to Ms. O'Bryon's persistence, NBR holds an audience of about 1 million.

She says: "We felt from the very beginning that this was an important subject for viewers."