Live at 10 00 a. M. Eastern on cspan, ondemand on cspan. Org Supreme Court or on the cspan radio app. Hello and welcome to the Atlanta History Center virtual talk series but im virginia prescott and im your host for this talk. Tonight and talking with lisa napoli about her new book up all night, ted turner and the birth of 24 hour news for you can purchase the book directly from a cappella books and the link is in the chat on the right of your screen and the link is also at the Atlanta History Center website. As lisa and i talked please submit your questions and use a q a feature at the bottom of your screen and will try to answer as many as we can as time allows. We will be broadcasting excerpts of this interview on Second Thought this friday and you will hear me do what we call a re id to keep consistent sound while we are going. So excited to speak with lisa napoli who got her first journalism job at cnn after interning at cnn new york, and bc bureaus as a teenager and she is a reporter for the new york times. And many other outlets. She is author of two previous books radio shangrila and ray and joan and that is about the man who made the mcdonalds fortune and the woman who gave it all away. Lisa, thank you for being with us. Really, really excited about talking about this book. Back at you prayed thank you so much great i use the Atlanta History Center for research and im delighted to be virtually with the constituency now. Glad to have you. I think its difficult probably for some of the people watching to imagine life before news was accessible all time. Before Television News looked before when this launched four years ago. [audio difficulties] until ted turner turned the switch on w tcg channel 17 over on west peachtree street on all night there was no tv all night and it was really hard for people to imagine but before cable had come along and before ted had the Idea Television stopped after usually the late movie and it was off all night until it fluttered on at dawn and the idea of an allnews or all anything channel was like a spaceship from mars. Crazy and unimaginable. The man behind this moonshot, ted turner, people are interested to know channel 17 here in atlanta made him a legendary figure here also owning the Atlanta Braves helped a lot but his early life may not be so wellknown. He inherited the business of billboard business from his father, hard drinking, womanizing, magnate who ted worked for on and off so what were some of the early signs of this persistent, risk loving entre nous or that he became . Science is a good word because he was in the billboard business. He inherited the bill board business and from the very beginning he saw and he was theatrical and saw grandeur and even the billboard but it wasnt enough for him and so as he got first into radio and then into tv he was a no holds barred conversation. The person he did really in any measure was steel the braves telecast by coming in and over bidding for he did not have money really and he certainly didnt have the audience but he stole it from w fst but you would have heard from people that he would stomp on peoples desks and say bye add time from me even though they an idea who he was or why they should spend money on add time from him. He was just a very colorful and no filter person who was persistent. The classic business story, entrepreneurs story did not take no for an answer and didnt let anything defeat him, even the fact that no one was watching his television station that he spends money that he really didnt have on. This business that he start started, this all started with tragedy and was left holding the reins of his fathers business after his father killed himself. Yes, and started buying radio stations and then dispersed uhs station, wg cd channel 17 and give us a sense of how frenzy uhs or even cable stations were at that point when he bought it . I dont know who is 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 into a station and maybe have rabbit ears on top of the television to just precisely tune in a station uhs versus vhs it was the super friends and they called it the lunatic fringe because it was very hard to tune in and even if you had the right devices and there was very little that was airing on it and they had a really scramble for programming. It was a big gavel and it sounds glamorous by television station but that kind of television station was really in the netherlands at that time and men who got into the business and was 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 go into that business was just wild in and of itself and then to do things like woo away the braves and start putting others sports and sporting events on the channel and crazy things, crazy movies that no one else would air, crazy commercials and build touches legendary and his crazy newscast in the middle of the night all of that combined to create a television station that people slowly but surely started jeanine and although they didnt always admit apparently. Tell us more especially people who dont know and im sure people who knew bill touch when he was on the air in the concept. [audio difficulties] 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 anti news which is why the story is such a great story. He wasnt a crusading news fellow at all but crusade against the news but had to put a certain amount of it on the air and bill touch was a young announcer and a young radio announcer who basically stumbled into the station and i hope he is other entities out there and say hello, bill. He stumbled into the station with all these other young folks who are just tantalized by the prospect of television he basically has been the sort of guy that drew the short straw as a station announcer who had to do the requisite newscast and is evolved over time into a fun requisite newscast that was not like any other. Now we have lampoons on the news all the time but they and he and the crew in the middle of the night or it aired in the middle of the night did a jokey newscast because they didnt want to do a serious one and had to persuade their boss in the station manager that it was okay to do this and that it was fulfilled the sec requirements for news and it became if they did it tongueincheek for themselves and but it turned out the station was being fed out around the southeast and ultimately around the nation and it became the signature of one of the entire station. Along with the georgia Championship Wrestling and one critic called it a masterpiece of bad take but it did started being broadcast and there was an sec rule change in 19 survey to which meant that but question was why were people watching a georgia station in nebraska. Because they could . Again for us now even those of us were members it is so hard to imagine a time when it was a few stations and went most of them went off at night if you are left up at night in kansas and there was bill in the middle of the night doing funny things it seemed like it was life trade you kept watching it because you are so thankful there was a late night movie and billed to entertain you. It was a proof of concept without them calling it that. Basically this story is about the perfect marriage and i love that it centered in atlanta and not in a typical Media Capital like los angeles or new york or dc basically ted and his merry ban of tv folk together the moment in Time Technology allowed were pumping out what they were doing first locally and then regionally and then nationally and showing the power of 24 hour news and the power of cable which is very unsexy thing and you know, in trouble right now but then it was like the internet and about the tesla of television at that time that allowed tv to rev up and 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 what programming should be for a really long time and created this wild west. Ted turner wants and but hes not a news guy and considered it a downer so what was the appeal for him and 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 he played around cable going regional then just in the typical area where it was licensed and when he heard about this one jerry livein and his hbo and how they would be made up to a satellite and broadcast it around the nation he wanted to do that to a new jerry livein would do it with a movie and movies had to license it and get all the rights to it and he wanted to do it maybe with a sports but if he did it was sports it would cannibalize the main ingredient of channel 17. He thought maybe i will do it with music and someone said thats a dumb idea but no one will ever watch music on television so finally the last grasp of what he could do with this technology and it really was a way to use the new technology was news and all news radio had just started bubbling up in some markets and even though that wasnt his thing that was his entree into using the satellite as a way to spread as a way to spread the station throughout the nation. And led to copyright. News has no copyright, extensive way to produce but they found the expense away and that the next part of the story. Heres a question from gm who says im really enjoying the book and since then he started doing joking news late at night to fulfill the sec requirements for Public Service programming did anyone at the fcc take notice that they were doing comedy rests on Current Events rather than straight news connect. I never noticed anything that suggested that and then maybe if someone out there knows but there are no records from that station and everything i found was cobbled together from people personals archives so no, ive never found anything. Part of that is part and parcel of the fact that nobody really cared but no one was really paying that close attention and the station manager apparently is a gust and austere on premises and he basically took issue with it and bill said nobody ever said there is a rule that it has to be serious so they managed to get away with it. There was not that much oversight of the stations that time because so many people went out of business with them and ted picked up another one and a fire sale in charlotte because the man started that just couldnt make it add up so they were really the lunatic fringe. There was a serious nest involved, hes a journalist that [inaudible] the program was everything that was wrong with Television News and becomes a major player in creating cnn and had a vision far beyond what the big screen networks are doing. What was his vision and how did ted turner come into this . He felt embodied a number of men at the time who were trying to walk those networks. For years people have been trying to pierce that network string a hold on not just the news but on entertainment but the problem always was that it was impossible to bust through because they owned literally the airwaves and so reid had been struggling in various jobs over the years to figure out how to do it as had some other men and basically he had been trying to settle news to ted for wtc g as an independent and for years that a new service that he was involved with an or one that he started, one previous to the one he started that he was involved with and he just wanted ted to get on board and independent stations across the board and ted kept saying no, no, absolutely not. I hate the news we will never do the news and ted did decide to do news and that is who he called with reese and reese would as hardcore news as ted was anti news so they made a very unusual pair but they both had the same role 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. Yes, he did not 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 and even people who work for him for the large part thought he was crazy and the other thing he did that i have not mentioned yet was along with bill and playing movies and sports no one would buy these commercials time from him so he got into this direct mail and again, today, go on the internet and order something in a second and it will be at the door in a couple of hours but back then if you could go or watch a Television Commercial for a product like a knife and order it and get it delivered that was a thrill and also besides it was utilitarian and those ads were the mainstay of the bar casting and as he able to get that station were out and out in the beginning ads were coming in United States and the caribbean and the evidence because there were no ratings that there was a hunger to watch the stuff. We will put a point in the caribbean because this comes into the story later. Teds renegade reputation was wellestablished by then and 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 quotes in this book because he such a colorful character but there is a wonderful scene where reese comes and needs ted at a ramshackle station and this was a place where, you know, rain and smoke snow comes through and the snow is coming to the roof is a bit of a dive and they talk about what it would take to create a new station so can you give us a little sense of that conversation. Well, basically you know, they were at odds because reese could not imagine that you would start a new station in a place like atlanta in the late 1970 1970s. Ted wanted it to be in atlanta and he didnt really understand exactly what he wanted to have on it except that he wanted to have this channel and reese was very excited about the idea of finding his star and they felt they needed some journalistic credibility because teds reputation at that point was super wild and was yachtsman of the year, publicly crazy and all over the place with women and so they needed somebody sobering and reese said i think we should try to go after dan rather and it wasnt entirely clear who dan rather was to ted turner. That is how checked out of the news world he was and that story comes to reese and i dont know if it was absolutely true but i believe it in the sense that ted just did not watch the news and it wasnt important to him and it wouldnt make sense that he wasnt certainly home at 630 at night when the network news ran because he was too busy working all the time. And sailing. And running around with his lady friends it wasnt clear that he would he would know who the most famous news or second famous after Walter Cronkite it may be someone they could go after and dan rather and cbs had just come back on another show if they had enough money they could woo him and he was confident. That was part of the challenge but they were apart in atlanta far from new york and los angeles and the television capitals that were there at the time and the other challenges reese had never even produced an hour of Live Television and he signing up to do this 247 network, 365 days a year so it was a real hustle to find that staff and turn this abandoned country club into an elaborate set and newsroom. What does it mean to bring people to atlanta . What challenges . Also to add to your point theres not entirely clear that even veteran newspeople saw that this was an intoxicating proposition and a lot of people saw that it was outrageously insane that anyone would watch this in the newsroom is cleaning your vegetables and back to your question basically ted found at the location or his people from the country club at tech would be the old Progressive Club had been sitting there for years and maybe be developed and maybe not the sole club had rats in it and they had to retrofit it pretty quickly. Satellite dishes had to be installed and they were not common and he was going to have the largest array of satellite dishes ever installed at that point but also besides the equipment and there is a lot of story here about the changing technology was the Human Resources and as you say convincing people to move to atlanta for not too much money for something that might not work and was not a foregone conclusion. Basically, reese and his folks Ted Kavanaugh was a chief producer and they decided they needed to get cheap labor, tried and true, was to go out and find young people were willing to work for less than minimum wage and to have the starry eyed moment in television that they cannot get because there were only three networks and there was no chance for them to get work if they werent the creme de la creme so that is what several of the men including Ted Kavanaugh went out and went to Journalism Schools and rallied around people and meanwhile hundreds of tapes were streaming in to the makeshift orders on west peachtree street because there were people in local news who were dying to have the chance to be on the air or to produce network news again, there were that many opportunities at the actual network so there were people who were willing to put their life on hold and the other thing that happened that was also incredibly unusual at the time also was people find it fascinating is that hiring couples was a verboten or keeping couples if you had met your husband or a guy at the television station you worked at one of you would have to leave. So reese could get a twoforone and one was a camera person and if one was an anchor woman he went for it and it was cheaper to move them and of course they were invested in the place was marching towards this deadline of june 1, 1980 and pitching in with the tech drive facility and help the tax basically making it all up we do know they did pass on one upandcoming journalist amy opal or winfrey so with charlie rose but they were able to snap because the stories are markable of how they got this in a year and its like out startup of course that happened and it crackles with excitement this frat house atmosphere and how fresh were the stories were people told them to you. You know, some people held back the really fun drugs and chec