Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News

“In the space race which morphed into the Information Age, a quiet war raged over the flow of news that ultimately reached TV screens. If not for Lisa Napoli’s fantastic sense of humor and remarkable skills as a writer, this peek into high-tech history might be a yawner for the average reader; or worse, a story only industry insiders could appreciate. Graciously, Napoli rescued this documentary of the wrecking-ball fashion in which Ted Turner and company forever shifted the spoon-feeding that the Mega Media doled out in continuous, flowing, fire-hose style reporting.

Napoli writes from an insider’s perspective as a teenage intern at CNN’s New York bureau. Since then her career as a journalist bloomed with experience at The New York Times, Marketplace, MSNBC, and KCRW. She has also written two other books: Radio Shangri-La and Ray and Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away. Napoli, displaying a rare genius by capsulizing human interest stories with the dramatic event of a little girl falling into a well, invoked sweeping changes in reporting that evolved over half a century. Whether you are old enough to recall the antics of America’s Cup defender, Captain Outrageous a.k.a. Ted Turner, or grew up with a phone in your hand, you will laugh out loud at the comedy of errors that got us hooked on the news.”