The 24-hour news cycle

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next: The World History Book.

In the late 1970s, those who wanted to watch the news had to turn on their TVs at a set time.

But on June 1st, 1980 the 24-hour news cycle began.

That was the day the Cable News Network, CNN, first signed on.

LINDSAY MAST: April 23, 1979. Ted Turner announces his plan to start a 24-hour news network. He calls it “CNN.”

TED TURNER: …the Cable News Network, and will program continually updated half-hour segments of national news, business news, sports, and features 24 hours a day.

TURNER: I pledge to you that we will not let the American public down.

Turner spends the next year putting together a team of nearly 300 people to run the network. One was producer and copy editor Mark Aldren.

MARK ALDREN: When I came to Atlanta for my interview, there was no real infrastructure for CNN at all. We knew we had a big job ahead of us. It was constant, we were constantly meeting, and outside of our world, there was a lot of skepticism.

But he says Turner was confident and always thinking ahead. Aldren remembers a pre-launch meeting where the team was trying to figure out how to focus newscasts for different U.S. time zones. Turner popped in to listen and described a bigger vision–one that could have implications for the Cold War.

ALDREN: And someday he said, I want to even beam this into Russia, and maybe that way those people will understand us better, and they won’t want to come over here and bomb us. We’re focusing on how do we broadcast to Des Moines, you know, he’s already thinking about how to broadcast around the globe, that was typical Ted.

The team started rehearsals. But just days before the launch, the newsroom desktop computer system malfunctioned.

ALDREN: So we said, get all these things out of here. And so for the actual launch on june 1, 1980, we were back to using typewriters and carbon, carbon sheets again.

The Los Angeles bureau also had problems:

ALDREN: That crew out there had some of their camera gear stolen. I think it was on the day before the launch, and so they had to go get rental camera gear.

AUDIO: Roll tape, ready, 13, full, ready, camera three, one, center up.

But at 6 p.m. on June 1st, 1980, CNN went on the air.

NEWS ANCHOR: Good evening, I’m David Walker, and I’m Lois Hart. Now, here’s the news….

Aldren was in the newsroom that day.

GUIDE: Now we have a pool of producers here. Each one does two hour shows, one hour show, then four hours off, another hour show. They take the material from the pool, and they send it over

The team had proved they could launch a network, but detractors took longer to convince. They expressed skepticism about Turner’s lack of journalism experience—calling the station “Chicken Noodle News,” or the “Chicken Noodle Network.”

Inside, the staff continued to struggle with new technology. A single video cable connected the control room in Atlanta to New York through the bureau in Washington D.C. Someone there had to flip a physical switch to establish the shot.

ALDREN: You’re on a headphone and you’re talking on a com, and you know your New York is coming up, and you’re saying to the guy in Washington, please flip the switch, please flip the switch, please flip the switch, and you’re sweating. You’re sweating bullets.

CNN goes on to become a dominating force in television news. Less than a year after launch, it breaks the news of the attempted assassination of President Reagan. In 1986 it’s the only network to broadcast the Challenger explosion live.

Aldren says the staff was hungry to cover the news. He says at times he would go home and come back the next day– to see coworkers who had never left.

ALDREN: They were so invested, they were on the front lines, and they just couldn’t let it go. That was the way it was in those early days.

He says Ted Turner was a maverick who also took care of the people working so hard for him, offering generous time off in return for the long hours.

ALDREN: People were very loyal, and they had high ethical standards there. It was one of those things where every once in a while, if you’re lucky, you get to be part of sort of a magical, wonderful situation. situation, and that’s what this was,

CNN has been on the air continuously since its launch but has experienced a decline in viewership in the last decade.

Ted Turner left the company in 2003 and passed away last month.

In 2023 CNN moved out of its landmark building in downtown Atlanta. Much of the current staff is located in New York and in bureaus around the globe, but about a thousand report to work on a campus at the original location.…Read more by