Three, two, one… On air! On air? Yes, on air!

When Cable News Network, CNN, was 20 years old 20 years ago, it posted an very understable interactive feature (I did not find the 20-year commemorative but the 25-year one, instead)about how it operated from its newsroom to the communications engeneering that allows it to have global coverage. One of the things I wondered of, how it organizes when there is the famous breaking news.

CNN, which broadcast started on June 1^st, 1980, born as an improbable entrepreneurship, loses wherever you saw, pushed by a neurotic Atlanta, GA-native magnate named Robert Edward Turner III, Ted Turner for friends.

No one gave a dollar for a 24-hour news channel initially broadcasting from a basement. No one impressed of its informative power even when it moved to Omni Hotels compound facilities, partially renamed as CNN Center later, in Atlanta Downtown, the home of the one most popular sodas in the planet. No one belief the small cable market would make a difference.

No one until 1991, when the world realized it was CNN-adict to know what was happening in the Middle East during the Gulf War, the first warlike conflict practically broadcast globalwide on live-TV, and that redefined the notion of journalistic inmediacy, covering the story as it happens in the same instant it is happening. And covering a live-story is not an easy job. If not watch this clip:

Like every respectable newsroom, CNN has the space organized by topics: domestic, international, business, politics, etc. Each one has a section editor, which job is reviewing the work of the entire crew, selecting the most interesting and important, upgrading another level in charge of a senior editor, who sets the agenda we receive everyday.

Nothing extraordinary until here because that is made in every newsroom. When there is breaking news, the thing changes completely right there. The secttion editors give the position to the senior editor, becoming part of the crew they lead, and it’s this senior editor who organizes the whole coverage with an only purpose – checking the news fact as it breaks, and once the fact-checking protocols were accomplished, go releasing, or coordinating to the line producer for addressing the on-air presenter.

According to Live From Baghdad motion picture (HBO, 2002) and a story on Time magazine on January 1992 (which excerpt was lended to me by one of my Journalism teachers, María Luisa Portugal), during the Gulf War, Turner as well as his CEO Tom Johnson took the editorial control of the network during the historic broadcast on January 16^th, 1991 (when the Desert Storm Operation started), because they were aware the entire world –the entire world!—was watching CNN. It was the first time it was happening, so reducing the error margin was their main task. Here is the original broadcast of that afternoon (17:00 EST):

Independently the ideologic criticism it receives everywhere, when the news are breaking in this right instant, many people even tune CNN around the globe to know how the story is developing, and, of course, very few people are aware of the crew behind making that happens.

Indeed, since 1980s-ending and more emphatically in the 1990s, the around-the-clock, around-the-globe news channels offer has multiplied, so options are to choose, but the live-story formula has not suffered from major modifications, except the technology wwhich it is broadcast, smaller each time, enormous each chance. And 40 years later, CNn, the news channels, the journalists have a great story to cover, especially when the world asks more than understands.