Up All Night
Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News

Before Ted Turner, television stations turned off their lights, played the national anthem, and displayed a "test screen" or other symbol until broadcasts resumed in the morning. Ted Turner changed that when he bought a small TV station in Atlanta and began playing movies all night long. Soon he's b......more

Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the birth of 24-Hour News by Lisa Napoli is an engrossing history of the lead-up to and launch of 24-hour news. As such, it is also a bit of a biography of Ted Turner since his, um, personality played a large role. This book was more interesting than I anticipated,......more

Turns out, the guy that invented 24-hour news is exactly like you’d think he’d be. I expected this to be a throwaway read; something I take the facts from and nothing else. However, Napoli’s style actually turned this into a somewhat unputdownable read. Ted’s unpredictability is reflected in the som......more

I worked in the control room of one of the pre-CNN cable systems and we signed on to CNN when the network itself signed on. We were one of the few systems to take advantage of CNN2's local avails in cooperation with the local paper and Ted Turner himself came here to do a local newsbreak himself. (......more

On another app, with half-star ratings allowed, this would be a 3.5 or even 3.75 rating. I enjoyed it, I would recommend it to some, but not everyone. I didn't love some of the actual writing, the sentence structure was weird sometimes. But the story was a doozy and enjoyable enough to read about th......more