What's Happening at CNN

• JANE MAXWELL,Senior vice president of special events: An assassination attempt had put Vernon Jordan in an Indiana hospital. On June 1, President Carter was scheduled to visit the civil rights leader. Maxwell persuaded NBC's local affiliate to sell CNN its live coverage — then successfully battled the three broadcast networks (who would air the taped footage later during their nightly newscasts) for shared access to the only video line out of Fort Wayne."From that first hour on the air, we were a player," says Maxwell, 52.

• WILL KING,Director for International News Operations: "There truly were routine rumors, 'Oh did you hear? They don't have enough money to cover payroll this week,' " King, 53, says of the early on-air days. CNN never became insolvent, but some employees still rushed out at lunchtime to cash their paychecks. "There was sort of a quiet agreement among some of us that if worse comes to worst and they need some people to just stick it out and work without pay for a while, hey, we're raising our hands."

• WENDY WALKER WHITWORTH,CNN Executive Vice President and Senior Executive Producer of "Larry King Live" and "Nancy Grace": Whitworth, 52, laughs as she recalls unpacking the swivel chairs inside the new network's Washington bureau with reporter John Holliman. "They were some of Ted's old furniture from Atlanta. We were in a bureau with nothing in it but these two chairs, and we were just laughing and laughing."

• RICK DAVIS, Executive Vice President, News Standards and Practices: "I remember saying to somebody two weeks before we went on the air, 'We need to say to somebody that we should not be going on the air June 1, because we're not ready,' " says Davis, who quickly decided Ted Turner was right not to flinch. "Was it great television news in the first day and the first week? No, but we were on the air. We said we were going to be, and once we flipped the switch, we haven't stopped."

• ANDY PARSONS, Director, Technical Projects, CNN: Parsons had never traveled outside the United States when he found himself detouring from San Francisco and the 1984 Democratic National Convention where he was working for CNN operations to Beirut.
  U.S. Marines were in Lebanon on a peacekeeping mission, and CNN wanted to cover the story. Enter Parsons, with a bulletproof vest and itinerary that had him flying to Paris, then on to Cyprus for a 12-hour boat ride to Beirut. As his car approached Beirut's violence-plagued west side, he thought, We're not in Kansas anymore.
  "It was devastated," recalls Parsons, 49, who operated cameras and audio there. "There was not a light on. There was not a building that wasn't blown up."

# posted by ATN @ 12:02 PM

Today is the day many have been waiting for and to think some thought CNN wouldn't be around to see it. CNN is 25 years old today so let's take you back in time with a short video of the first seconds of broadcasting back on June 1st, 1980.


The husband and wife anchor team (the first husband/wife anchor team on cable TV BTW) of David Walker and Lois Hart anchored the inaugural newscast on CNN. David and Lois are still a team at KCRA in Sacramento, California. The rest is as they say, history.

# posted by ATN @ 12:00 AM

• "Twenty-five years ago, CNN was a dream," said Jim Walton, who has been president of CNN for 24 of those 25 years. "Fast-forward to today, and CNN is one of the most recognized brands in the world."

• "We had a larger-than-life [founder and] leader in Ted Turner," said Walton, "and we had a lot of ambitious, passionate journalists who wanted to make a difference."

• "If we stick to our knitting," said Walton about the competition, "and we get it right, and we're accurate and timely and we continue to be innovative, we will continue to grow."

• "There have been so many remarkable times over the 24 years," he said, "but the thing that I'll remember the most is in the early days the people at more established news organizations looking down on us as if somehow we didn't belong."

# posted by ATN @ 10:44 AM

• "Some of [CNN's] problems the company brought on itself with various management changes, and some of it was brought on by very loud competitors who were trying - and some would say they were successful in some areas - to define CNN."

• "What you will see over the next two to four years is that technology will change the media more than in the past 15 [and] so what we need to do as a news organization is to try and get our arms around what we feel the consumers expect and want out of us."

• Walton also makes perfectly clear that he supports Klein, although he is perfectly unclear about what changes may be in the works. Larry King, 71, "will be doing [his show] for as long as he wants to," while prime-time hosts Paula Zahn and Aaron Brown, are "consummate professionals. ... Aaron is a wonderful writer [and] there are a lot of people who are very, very loyal to [him]. Am I one of them? Loyalty's a funny thing ... he needs to perform as do all of our people, and as long as he performs, I'll continue to be loyal."

• Walton on Ted Turner: "Ted was the face of CNN and he's missed by a lot of people, including me."

• But lately CNN has been on pause, or a sense that prime time, daytime and early morning are about to be overhauled yet again. "Whenever there's change people, get a little nervous, and no doubt people want to see what's going to happen," says veteran anchor Wolf Blitzer. "[But] I'm pretty optimistic that on the 25th anniversary, we're moving in the right direction."

# posted by ATN @ 12:28 AM

UPDATE: Look for Judy Woodruff to be subbing for Wolf on Wolf Blitzer Reports.

UPDATE: 6:00pm EDT Rick Sanchez is at CNN Center in Atlanta anchoring the Now in the News updates. Sanchez said he'll be in providing updates through out the evening. ALSO Kitty Pilgrim is in for Lou Dobbs.

UPDATE 6:35PM: All programs tonight are taped. Sanchez will be the only thing, let me rephrase that, will be the only person LIVE. Even Showbiz Tonight on HLN is on tape. UPDATE: Nancy Grace was on tape as well, while Prime News is LIVE.

Last UPDATE for this post: This from an e-mailer: "Rick Sanchez filled in for Aaron tonight, stated that Aaron would be back tomorrow. Wednesday will probably be taped segments of the REALLY BIG stories over the past 25 years, and one has to wonder of NN, and the other prime time programs might be back to normal on Thursday and Friday - we can only hope so." DCG comments: I think I saw a promo today that said NewsNight Thursday will be about identity theft. Could this be the SAME one that ran weeks ago?

# posted by ATN @ 12:00 PM

• "It used to do huge ratings, but now it's facing not just competition from Fox News but regional news networks and the Internet," said Brad Adgate, a former CNN sales researcher who now directs corporate research at Horizon Media. "The concept of around-the-clock, all-day news that CNN invented in this country — they're not the only source for it anymore."

• "It's safe to say there is at least a component of CNN employees, particularly those of long duration, who are still wondering what the sense of direction is," said Charles Bierbauer, dean of the University of South Carolina's College of Mass Communications and Information Studies, who worked as a CNN correspondent for 20 years."The challenge is to get back to the things they have learned to do so well and in some way distance themselves from what Fox and other followers are doing," Bierbauer said. "They need to stand out as unique again."

• "I would like to see the numbers on CNN/U.S. go up, and I'm confident that Jon and his team are working really, really hard," Jim Walton said of the network's new president.

• Klein's challenge is a perennial one for CNN executives: getting viewers who flock to the channel for breaking stories to stick around afterward."That's a problem," admitted Walter Isaacson, a former CNN chairman who is now president of the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C. "When you're basically a hard-news reported network, there are going to be periods when the news isn't as compelling."

• "It's terrific that Americans know to run to CNN whenever there is breaking news," Klein said. "But we want to create a new habit, which is to turn to us every night before they go to sleep to find out what's going on in their world."

• Deborah Potter, a former Washington correspondent for CNN who now runs NewsLab, a nonprofit journalism training and research center in the nation's capital, said the promotional gimmicks indicate that the network is still searching for its identity."They're basically trying to get their ratings up in any way possible," Potter said. "If you watch what they're doing on the air, it seems softer, rather than harder. It seems to me they're casting about."

# posted by ATN @ 8:43 PM