CNN a Front-Row Seat for History

In the beginning the question was whether we could do it at all.
Around-the-clock news? Was there even enough news to fill 24 hours?
Those were the questions being asked when I joined the staff of CNN on February 4, 1980, five months before the network went on the air.
I had come to CNN from the Atlanta Journal via a six-year stint at UPI. Aside from knowing how to write a five-minute newscast for the broadcast wire, I knew nothing about television.
That day I was told I would be the broadcast industry's first full-time copy editor. Even at the networks, it seemed, producers had read scripts, but with 24 hours of news, editors had been added to the team.