After 30 years CNN struggles with changing face of news

By Andy Goldberg May 29, 2010, 14:54 GMT

Los Angeles - A married pair of news anchors went on the air for the first broadcast of the Cable News Network on June 1, 1980, in Atlanta, Georgia.

The transmission marked the start of the first 24-hour television news channel in history, but its significance 30 years later goes far beyond the television or media worlds.

The advent of a 24/7 news channel may seem blase in our always-on, Twitterized world. But the CNN broadcast heralded the era of immediacy and linked the world to major news events like never before.

It changed the way governments and businesses make decisions and proved that giving people constant access to information does not necessarily make them better informed.

'CNN really changed the way TV journalism worked,' noted Bob Thompson, a professor of TV and popular culture at Syracuse University. 'A new international news service, based in Atlanta, Georgia, brought to you by a guy who had run a cable TV channel. It wasn't exactly a likely scenario.'

At the time, most people were still getting their news from newspapers in the morning and nightly television newscasts in the evening, when oracle-like anchors told them what was happening in the world.

CNN smashed that model to smithereens, offering viewers news as it happened - a key attribute in our get-it-now society, where events are often born, hyped and forgotten before the old-time news anchors have even put on their make-up.

Thirty years later, CNN is rivaled only by the venerable BBC as the world's premier news outlet. It is available to viewers in more than 200 countries, has 36 bureaus around the world, more than 900 affiliated local stations and boasts a team of 4,000 news professionals.

But it took CNN several years to reach its apogee.

Most credit the network's coverage of the Challenger disaster in 1986 as the moment that CNN came of age, when it was the only TV channel broadcasting the catastrophic launch of the space shuttle. CNN further enhanced its global reputation in the 1991 Gulf War when it was the only news outlet to broadcast directly from Baghdad during the initial airstrikes.

Soon afterward, academics and Pentagon officials began talking about the 'CNN effect.'

First studied by Professor Steve Livingston of the George Washington University, the CNN effect described how the broadcast of events from around the world affected US foreign policy.

CNN's coverage of the anarchy and famine is Somalia in 1992, for instance, was a major factor in the decision by the first President George Bush to send troops there on an ill-fated humanitarian mission. A year later, CNN's footage of the body of a US soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu prompted then- President Bill Clinton to withdraw US forces.

Over the years, CNN has struggled to maintain its position as the go-to source for news and has been hard hit by competition from other cable news networks that sprang up in its wake.

Channels like Fox News and MSNBC have taken a partisan approach to coverage in the US, while the competition for ratings has spawned a sensationalized news culture that values the controversy and cheaply produce talk.

Like the older media outlets it first outpaced, CNN has been further challenged by the ubiquity of news on the internet and the real-time reporting on sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter - illustrated during big recent events such as the demonstrations in Iran and the earthquake in Haiti.

'Global TV has been overtaken by the revolution in digital technology,' Livingston told the German Press Ageny dpa. 'We can no longer isolate the TV effect - we need to think about the global digital effect.'