Published in 2020
304 pages
Lisa Napoli is a journalist who has worked in all media. She began her career at CNN in Atlanta in the early eighties, worked in local TV news in North Carolina, covered the Clinton campaign and Waco standoff as a field producer for an early iteration of the Fox News Service, produced shows for an upscale division of QVC called Q2, covered the early days of the Web for the NY Times as the first staff columnist/reporter hired for a now defunct-section called CyberTimes, served as Internet correspondent for MSNBC (where she wrote an accompanying column for MSNBC.com) and most recently served as reporter/back-up host for the public radio show Marketplace.
What is this book about?
The wild inside story of the birth of CNN and dawn of the age of 24-hour news
How did we get from an age of dignified nightly news broadcasts on three national networks to the age of 24-hour channels and constantly breaking news? The answer—thanks to Ted Turner and an oddball cast of cable television visionaries, big league rejects, and nonunion newbies—can be found in the basement of an abandoned country club in Atlanta. Because it was there, in the summer of 1980, that this motley crew somehow, against all odds, launched CNN.
Lisa Napoli’s Up All Night is an entertaining inside look at the founding of the upstart network that set out to change the way news was delivered and consumed. Mixing media history, a business adventure story, and great characters, Up All Night tells the story of a network that succeeded beyond even the wildest imaginings of its charismatic and uncontrollable founder, and paved the way for the world we live in today.
