When the Cable News Network (CNN) launched on the evening of June 1, 1980, it was a youthful upstart business. There were just a few hundred employees, and the company was based not in New York or Los Angeles, but in a former country club building on the periphery of Atlanta, Georgia. Cable television itself was still relatively new, and the idea of a 24-hour news channel made its programming practically experimental.
The big broadcast networks and their regularly scheduled nightly newscasts had a lock on viewers and TV news. The network news desks were money machines with massive resources and handsomely paid name-brand talent.
