Saturday 1 June 2024

CABLE NEWS NETWORK (CNN) BEGINS BROADCASTING

Today, The Grandma has been watching CNN, the multinational news channel that began broadcasting on a day like today in 1980.

Cable News Network (CNN) is a multinational news channel and website operating from Midtown Atlanta, Georgia, U.S

Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by the Manhattan-based media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), CNN was the first television channel to provide 24-hour news coverage and the first all-news television channel in the United States.

As of December 2023, CNN had 68,974,000 television households as subscribers in the US According to Nielsen, down from 80 million in March 2021.

In June 2021, CNN ranked third in viewership among cable news networks, behind Fox News and MSNBC, averaging 580,000 viewers throughout the day, down 49% from a year earlier, amid sharp declines in viewers across all cable news networks. 

While CNN ranked 14th among all basic cable networks in 2019, then jumped to 7th during a major surge for the three largest cable news networks (completing a rankings streak of Fox News at number 5 and MSNBC at number 6 for that year), it settled back to number 11 in 2021 and had further declined to number 21 in 2022.

Globally, CNN programming has aired through CNN International, seen by viewers in over 212 countries and territories. Since May 2019, however, the US domestic version has absorbed international news coverage in order to reduce programming costs. The American version, sometimes referred to as CNN (US), is also available in Canada, and some islands in the Caribbean. CNN also licenses its brand and content to other channels, such as CNN-News18 in India. In Japan it broadcasts CNNj which started in 2003, with simultaneous translation in Japanese.

The Cable News Network launched at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time on June 1, 1980. After an introduction by Ted Turner, the husband and wife team of David Walker and Lois Hart anchored the channel's first newscast. Burt Reinhardt, the executive vice president of CNN, hired most of the channel's first 200 employees, including the network's first news anchor, Bernard Shaw.

Since its debut, CNN has expanded its reach to several cable and satellite television providers, websites, and specialized closed-circuit channels (such as CNN Airport). The company has 42 bureaus (12 domestic, 31 international), more than 900 affiliated local stations (which also receive news and features content via the video newswire service CNN Newsource), and several regional and foreign-language networks around the world. The channel's success made a bona-fide mogul of founder Ted Turner and set the stage for conglomerate Time Warner's (later WarnerMedia which merged with Discovery Inc. forming Warner Bros. Discovery) eventual acquisition of the Turner Broadcasting System in 1996.

CNN launched its website, CNN.com (initially known as CNN Interactive), on August 30, 1995. The site attracted growing interest over its first decade and is now one of the most popular news websites in the world. The widespread growth of blogs, social media and user-generated content have influenced the site, and blogs, in particular, have focused CNN's previously scattershot online offerings, most noticeably in the development and launch of CNN Pipeline in late 2005.

In April 2009, CNN.com ranked third place among online global news sites in unique users in the U.S., according to Nielsen/NetRatings; with an increase of 11% over the previous year.

CNN Pipeline was the name of a paid subscription service, its corresponding website, and a content delivery client that provided streams of live video from up to four sources or pipes, on-demand access to CNN stories and reports, and optional pop-up news alerts to computer users. The installable client was available to users of PCs running Microsoft Windows. There was also a browser-based web client that did not require installation. The service was discontinued in July 2007, and was replaced with a free streaming service.

In early 2008, CNN began maintaining a live streaming broadcast available to cable and satellite subscribers who receive CNN at home (a precursor to the TV Everywhere services that would become popularized by cable and satellite providers beginning with Time Warner's incorporation of the medium).

CNN International is broadcast live, as part of the RealNetworks SuperPass subscription service outside the U.S. CNN also offers several RSS feeds and podcasts.

More information: CNN


 I'm not searching for hard news;
I'm not a journalist, but I'm interested
in pushing to boundaries of where we can do
the kind of stories that we want to do.
I mean, it's a big world and CNN has made it
 a lot bigger and they haven't flinched.

Anthony Bourdain

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