History center website. As lisa and i are talking can please submit your question you can use the q a feature at the bottom of your screen. I will try to integrate as many as i possibly can as time allows. We will be broadcasting excerpts of the interview on on Second Thought this friday. You will hear me do bid to keep consistent sound while we are going. Im so excited to speak with lisa napoli, who got her first journalism job at cnn after interning at cnn new york and dc bureaus as a teenager. Shes a reporter for the new york times, marketplace msnbc and many other outlets stop shes the author of two previous books radio shangrila and ray and joan, thats about the man who made the mcdonalds fortune and the woman who gave it all away. Lisa, thank you so much for being with us, really excited about talking about the book. Back at you. Thank you so much. I use the Atlanta History Center for research so im delighted to be virtually with the constituency now. We are glad to have you. I think its difficult probably for some of the people watching to imagine life before news was accessible all the time. Or what Television News even look like before cnn wants four years ago. This idea of 24 hour, 24 7 Cable News Network before cnn. Until ted turner turned the switch on channel 17 on west peachtree street on all night, there was no tv all night. It really is hard for people to imagine but before cable had come along and before ted had the idea, television stopped usually after the late movie. It was off all night until it fluttered on at dawn. The idea of an allnews or all anything channel was like a spaceship from mars. Crazy and unimaginable. The man behind the moonshot ted turner, people of a certain vintage no wb pg channel 17 here in atlanta made him a legendary figure here also owning the Atlanta Braves helped a lot. His early life maybe not so well known. He inherited the business of billboard business from his father, hard drinking, womanizing, what were some of the early signs of the unfiltered persistent risk loving entrepreneur he became . Sciences good word because he was in the billboard business. He would do things ive heard from a number of people that he would stomp on peoples desks and say, by add time from me even though they had no idea who he was or why they should spend money on add time from him. He was a very colorful and no filter person who was persistent. Its a classic business story, entrepreneur story, he did it take no for an answer, he didnt let anything defeat him. Even the fact that nobody was watching his television station that he spent money he really didnt have on. This business he started, also started with tragedy he was left holding the reins after his father killed himself. He was just 24 years old at that time. Started buying radio stations and then the first uhs station, w dcg channel 17, give us a sense of of how fringe e cable stations were at that point when he bought it. I dont know whos out there but for people who might remember the time when you had to get up off the couch and turn a dial to tune in a station and maybe have rabbit ears on top of the television to just precisely tune in a station, uhs versus vhs, they called it the lunatic fringe it was very hard to tune in. Even if you had the right devices. There was very little bearing on it they had to scramble for programming. It sounds glamorous to buy a television station but that kind of television station was really sort of another land at that time. Men who got into the business mostly men were real risktakers and hoping it might get parlayed into a different sort of tv. So for ted to take the chance to get into that business was just wild in and of itself. Then to do things like woo away the braves and start putting others sporting events on the channel and crazy things, crazy movies that no one else would air, crazy commercials and bill touches legendary. His crazy newscast all of that combined to create a television station people slowly but surely started tuning in although they didnt always admit it. Tell us a little bit more especially for people who dont know im sure people who knew bill touch on the air, as part of the licensing to run a television station you needed to show a certain amount of Public Affairs on the air. Ted was decidedly antinews which is why this story is such a great story. He was in a abhe wasnt a crusading news fellow at all. Bill touch was a young announcer a young radio announcer who basically stumbled into the station. It is out there, say hello bill. He stumbled into the station and with all these other young folk who were just tantalized by the prospect of television he basically had been this guy who drew the short straw as the station announcer who had to do the requisite newscast and its evolved over time into a fallen requisite newscast that was not like any other. Now we have lampoons in the news all the time. He and the crew in the middle of the night, it aired in the middle of the night, did a jokey newscast because they didnt want to do a serious one and they had to persuade their boss, the station manager combat was okay to do this as it would fulfill the fcc requirements for news. It became, they did it tongueincheek from themselves but it turned out the station was being fed out around the southeast and ultimately around the nation. It became the sort of signature or one of the signatures of the entire station. Georgia championship wrestling. One critic because of the masterpiece of bad taste. The television station. But i want to get to where you talked about that it started being broadcast outside the states and fcc rule change in 1972 which meant bill touch started getting fan mail from outside of iona. For us now even those of us who remembers those days, its so hard to imagine a time when theres just a few stations. When most of them went off at night, if you were left up at night in kansas and there was bill t. O. S. H. A. The middle of the night doing funny things, seemed like it was live, wow, you kept watching it because you are so thankful there was a late night movie and bill touch to entertain you. It was a proof of concept without them calling it that, basically ted, this story is really the perfect marriage and i love that its centered in atlanta and not in a typical Media Capital like los angeles or new york or dc. Ted and his merry band of tv folk together with the moment in time the technology allowed, pumping out what they were doing first locally, then regionally, then nationally and showing the power of 24 hour news. The power of cable, which is a very unsexy thing and in trouble right now. But then it was like the internet. It was like the tesla of television at that time that allowed tv to wrap up, god help us, to new heights. It was also a shot across the bow at the three Major Networks that had been deciding what news was and should have been a pretty long time that created this wild west. Ted turner walked in but as you said, he was not a news guy. And considered a downer, what is the appeal for him starting in all news 24 hour station . Once he got word that a little upstart called Home Box Office was playing around with cable the same way that he was playing around with cable, that is, going more regionally than just the typical area where it was licensed, when he heard about this guy jerry lubin and his hbo and how they were going to beam it up to satellite and broadcast it around the nation, he wanted to do that too. He knew if jerry lubin was gonna do it with movies and movies were tough because you had to license it and get the rights to them, he wanted to do it may be with sports, if he did it with sports it would cannibalize the main ingredients of channel 17. He thought, maybe i will do it with music and someone said, thats a dumb idea. No one will ever watch music on television, so finally, the last grasp of what he could do with this technology, it really was a way to use the new technology was news. All news radio had just started bubbling up in some markets, somebody thought that might be interesting. Even though that wasnt his thing, that was his entrce into using the satellite as a way to spread a station throughout the nation. And often news has no copyright. Its expensive to produce but they found the cheapest way to produce it and thats the next part of the story. Heres a question from gm who says i really enjoyed the book since wtc g started doing jokey news late at night to fulfill the fcc requirements for Public Service programming, did anyone at the fcc take notice they were doing comedy risks on Current Events rather than straight news . And never noticed anything that suggested that. Maybe if somebody out there knows but there are no records from that station, everything i found was cobbled together from people personals archives. But i never found anything. I think part of that is part and parcel in the fact that nobody really cared. Nobody was paying that close attention. As a general manager there the station manager said pike apparently he was a steer grown up on premises. He basically took issue with it. Bill said, nobody ever said theres a rule that it has to be serious. So they managed to get away with it. I think a lot of it there was not that much oversight of those stations at that moment in time because so many of them came and went. People went out of business with them. Ted picked up another one in a fire sale in charlotte because the man who started that just couldnt make it add up. They were just really lunatic french. There is a serious news man in Baltimore Sean belted journalist who thinks that wtc d schlocky programming is everything thats wrong with Television News. Hes got a vision far beyond the victory networks. What is his vision and how does ted turner come into it . We sean feld embodies a number of men at the time who were trying to book those networks. For years people have been trying to pierce that network stranglehold on not just the news but on entertainment. The problem always was that it was impossible to bust through because they owned it literally the airwaves. Reese had been struggling at various jobs over the years to figure out how to do it as had some other men and basically hed been trying to sell news to ted for wtc g as an independent for years. He had a news service he was involved with and he thought that one that he started one previous to the one he started that he was involved with he just wanted ted to get on board the other independent stations around the country had an ted kept saying no absolutely not. I hate the news i will never do news. When ted did decide to do news, thats who he called was reese and reese was hardcore news as ted was antinews. They made a very unusual pair but they both had the same goal in mind and that was busting the conventional system of the networks. Someone just commented that ted was known to say he was cable before cable was cool. He didnt actually say that until the early 80s after cable did start getting cool because up until the point it was cool, nobody understood or cared, even the people who worked for him for the large part thought he was crazy. The other thing he did that i havent mentioned yet is along with bill tosh and play movies and sports no one would buy these commercials time from him so he got into this direct mail, today we go on the internet we can order something in a second it will be at the door in a couple hours but back then if you could go if you could watch Television Commercial for a product like a ginsu knife and order it and get it delivered, and also besides convenient it was utilitarian. Those kinds of ads were the mainstay of teds broadcasting and as he was able to get that station out more and more and even cnn at the beginning it was able to prove people were watching because orders were coming in from all over the United States and also the caribbean. There was mail coming in that evidence, because there were no ratings, there was a hunger to watch this stuff. Would get up at a point in the caribbean because this comes into the story a little bit later. Teds renegade reputation was wellestablished by then. One critic actually says the idea of him starting a new station was like attila the hun running summer camp for the elderly. [laughter] there are so many great in this because he such a colorful character. Theres a wonderful scene where reese comes in and meets him at his ramshackle station the place where rain and snow comes through when there is no snow comes through the roof. Its a bit of a dive. They talk about what it would actually take to create a news station. Can you give us a little sense of that conversation . Basically they were at odds because reese couldnt imagine you would start a new station in a place like atlanta in the late 1970s. Ted wanted it to be in atlanta. He didnt really understand exactly what he wanted to have audit except that he wanted to have this channel. Reese was very excited about the idea of finding a start. They felt they needed some sort of journalistic credibility because teds reputation at that point was super wild. He was yachtsman of the year he was publicly drunk, he was publicly crazy all over the place with women. They needed somebody sobering and reese said, i think we should try to go after dan rather, it wasnt entirely clear who dan rather was to ted turner. Thats how checked out of the news world he was. That story comes from reese, i dont know that its absolutely true but i believe it in the sense that ted just did it watch the news. It wasnt important to him. And running around with his lady friend. It wasnt very clear he would know who the most famous news man in america at that point or second after Walter Cronkite would be maybe possibly someone that could go after because he had another show, dan rather, cbs had cut back on another show that dan rather did. Reese is pretty sure that they had enough money they could woo him. He was very confident. That was part of the challenge they were in atlanta. This is far away from new york or los angeles and Television Capital that were there at that time. The other challenge is, reese wrote he never produced an hour of lifestyle and he is signing up to do this 24 7 network. 365 days a year. A real hassle to find that entered this abandoned country club into an elaborate set and new term. What does it mean to bring people to atlanta . What kind of challenges . Also to add to your point, it still was not entirely clear that anybody would watch this. Even veteran newspeople saw that this was an intoxicating proposition. A lot of people just saw this enrages outrageously insane at that point watching news is like eating your vegetables. Back to your question, basically ted found as a location or his people found an old left for dead country club at tech wood. It was the old Progressive Club that had been sitting there for years, it was maybe going to be developed, maybe not. They had to retrofit this old club with rats in it pretty quickly in order to have it ready. Satellite dishes had to be installed in the there were huge they were not common. He was going to have the largest array of satellite dishes ever excelled at that point. It also besides the equipment, and theres a lot of story here about the changing technology was the human resources. Convincing people to moved to atlanta for not too much money for something that might not work basically reset his folks one of his cheap producers he may be on the call too. They decided what they needed to do was get cheap labor. Young people were willing to work for less than minimum wage all for the chance to have the starry eyed moment in television we couldnt get because there were only three networks in a few hours of news produced everyday so there was no chance for them to get work if they were at the crcme de la crcme. So thats what they did. Several of the men including Ted Cavanaugh went out and went to Journalism School and rallied around people and, meanwhile, hundreds of tapes were streaming in to the makeshift quarters on west peachtree street because there were people in local news who were dying to have the chance to be on air or produce network news, there werent that many opportunities at the actual network. There were people who were willing to put their life on hold. The other thing that happened that was also incredibly unusual at the time hiring couples was verboten. Or keeping couples, if you met your husband or a guy at the television station you worked at, one of you would have to leave. If reese could get a twoforone, a couple may be one of the camera person and one was an anchorwoman, he went for it. They were invested in the place because everybody was marching toward this deadline of june 1, 1980. And pitching in, wiring the tech wood drive facility if they needed to, helping the tax. Basically making it all up. We do know that they did pass on one upcoming journal named oprah winfrey, charlie rose although they were able to stop the story is remarkable of how they got this going in a year. Its like a startup before startups actually happen. Operating like a Training Camp for tech. This crackles with excitement this frat house as it is. How fresh were those stories when people told them to you . Some people held back the really fun drugs and sex stories is still here about now especially now that the book is actually out. Because it was a big wild toga party apparently. Everybody who i talked to was so thrilled to be sharing that moment in time. What are they stayed in television or scurried out of the business after a year. They all had a memorable incredible experience because how often do you get to build something completely new and in many ways i think it ruined a lot of people because after you have that thrill of building something from scratch, Everything Else in the aftermath is going to feel feel hohum. Youre wedging into existing structure. This book was so much fun to write in part because there was no clearcut obvious source cnn did it help me in any way it even if they had, i wouldnt have relied entirely on what they had to say because this is so completely not a corporate book. Its so on corporate. Its not the message you want to get out about a place that it mightve failed that all the people who came there didnt know what the heck was going on. It wasnt a clearcut blueprint it was a majestic experiment and could have been a tremendous accident. We are talking about lisa up in the book up all night ab talking with lisa napoli under book up all night. Question from ricky, the book was w