Gasparino lands at Fox Business

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In one of its highest profile hires to date, Fox Business Network has signed veteran business reporter and CNBC correspondent Charlie Gasparino to a multi-year deal.

The move comes a little over two months after his last on-air appearance for CNBC, when he reported on Bank of America’s plans to pay back its bailout money.

A brash (some might say cocky) reporter, Gasparino, who wears his blue-collar, teen-boxer street cred on his Armani sleeves, was a lively presence on CNBC. Besides breaking some big stories, he also liked mixing it up with his colleagues, most famously Dylan Ratigan. Gasparino made waves late last year when he called on Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein to resign.

A CNBC spokesman said, ‘We thank him for all his quality contributions and we wish him the best.’ The spokesman declined to comment on why Gasparino had gone missing from CNBC’s air.

Gasparino, 47, said he was leaving General Electric Co.’s CNBC for the upstart Fox Business Network because he ‘wants to be part of something that could do something great.’ Though he claims to harbor no ill will toward CNBC, he did say his job at Fox Business is to ‘beat the hell out of the competition.’ Asked why he hadn’t been on CNBC’s air since early December, he said, ‘I was trying to figure out whether I wanted to stay or go.’

Gasparino will make his debut on Fox Business next week and will also pop up on the Fox News Channel as well. Terms of Gasparino’s deal were not disclosed, but it is a wee bit north of $1 million a year, people familiar with the contract said.

‘I think this is a better platform for him,’ said Kevin Magee, executive vice president of Fox Business Network. Asked if Gasparino’s role on Fox Business would be similar to that of CNBC’s hot-shot reporter David Faber, Magee said, ‘I’m sorry, who’s that?’Going to Fox Business is something of a homecoming for Gasparino, who made a name for himself covering Wall Street scandals including the Martha Stewart insider trading case and the downfall of New York Stock Exchange chief Richard Grasso while at the Wall Street Journal, which is now owned by Fox Business parent News Corp. (Full disclosure: I worked at the WSJ at the same time as Gasparino, but the only time we crossed paths was in the elevator.)

Fox Business, which has made some ratings gains as of late thanks in large part to the simulcast of Don Imus’ radio show on the network, still trails CNBC. Of course, CNBC is fully distributed in almost 100 million homes, while Fox Business is in just over 50 million homes.

-- Joe Flint