• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, Yesterday

Consuelo Mack, the host of the best show on TV covering investments and finance, announced the end of the show, “WealthTrack,” this past weekend after 21 years.

Mack, 76, said she will continue “WealthTrack” as a podcast, which is good news for her fans.

The TV show, airing weekly on PBS stations, represented a kind of pinnacle for financial television. 

It was a one-woman show. Over the years, Mack’s guests were drawn from an A-list of experts, investors and analysts from the nation’s most prestigious financial firms. 

On show after show, she demonstrated that she knew as much as they did.

But she never lost sight of her role as interviewer, allowing her guests ample time to air their views on the economic and market conditions affecting investors. They were often guests you didn’t see anywhere else. 

The “WealthTrack” TV show applied the simplest and most basic of formats -- one-on-one interviews with a single guest in each half-hour episode, with Mack on a set and her guests appearing remotely.

You would think that interviews like these would be dry. But they weren’t. Each episode was fascinating. The interviews made for great TV.

Mack closed each show with a brief “Action Point” segment in which she gave viewers one piece of action they can take for their own personal investing strategy. 

“This is a milestone we approach with immense gratitude -- for the guests who trusted us with their insights, the crews who brought our vision to life, the sponsors and donors whose generosity made it all possible, and the many public television stations that carried us into living rooms across the country,” Mack said at the conclusion of last weekend’s show, and posted on Facebook.

“None of this extraordinary journey would have been possible without you, our audience,” she said.

“For more than two decades, we have covered essential financial topics and pursued our mission to help viewers ‘build financial security to last a lifetime’,” Mack continued.

“We are proud of what we have accomplished together: fulfilling our mission of educating the public about long-term investing and saving through interviews with absolutely the best minds in the business,” she said.

She gave no specific reasons for why the show is ending, but blamed significant changes in the media landscape.

“The media landscape has changed significantly, and like so many programs on public television we have had to navigate a shifting environment,” Mack said. 

She was likely referring to the loss of federal funding for public TV and radio and along with that, the closing of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which managed funding for public broadcasting.

“While these challenges have made it difficult for us to continue in our current television format, they have also opened a door to something new,” she said, referring to the show’s “total transition to a podcast format,” using the same formula as the TV show and also titled “WealthTrack.” Platforms include Spotify, YouTube and Apple Podcasts.

Mack is a financial journalist who started in the financial field as a trainee at Merrill Lynch.

She went on to stints at Financial News Network and The Wall Street Journal, where she spent 10 years as anchor and managing editor of the WSJ’s TV show, “The Wall Street Journal Report.”

Companies that sponsored the “WealthTrack” TV show were ClearBridge Investments, Fairholme Investments, First Eagle Investments, Baird, Bill Miller Value Partners, Research Affiliates, Strategas Asset Management, Royce Investment Partners, Seafarer, and WISE, Women Investing in Security and Education.