Odes to Downtown Atlanta · Track 12 · middle
CNN Center and the Newsroom
CNN Center — the 1976 atrium tower at One CNN Center, the 24-hour cable-news studios, the food court on the ground level, the way Ted Turner built a global newsroom inside downtown Atlanta. The hum of the wire-room. Repton at the news desk.
Lyrics
[Intro] One CNN Center. But first, 1976. The Omni International complex. They built an ice-skating rink on the lower level. A public cold, a place for diversion. Before the feed went live. Before the air was conditioned to a perfect seventy degrees, day and night. [Verse 1] Then, June 1, 1980. Robert Edward Turner the Third has an idea. Reese Schonfeld at his side. They tear out the ice rink. They run cable through the walls. The great glass atrium, with its globe and its long-crawling escalators... It's no longer a mall. It's a lobby for the world. A promise of constant information. A wire from this room in downtown Atlanta to every television on the planet. [Chorus] The newsroom breathes on a twenty-four hour lung. The hum of the servers is its resting heart rate. Monitors flicker with datelines from places you cannot pronounce. The teletype chatter is the building's own pulse. There is no deadline here. There is only the feed. [Verse 2] Three in the morning. The food court is a ghost ship of fluorescent light on polished marble. The smell of day-old popcorn from a silent cart. Coffee burning in a glass pot at the Sbarro. Below the foundation, a low vibration. A MARTA train sliding into Five Points station. Another system, on another schedule, just beneath the floor. [Bridge] The Atlanta History Center has the architectural records. The corporate archive has the broadcast logs. Minute by minute, from that first day in 1980. But the record is silent on the names of the night-shift wire editors. The camera operators who missed their kid's birthday. The vendor who sold coffee to the morning crew before the sun came up. Their labor is not in the blueprint. Reese Schonfeld, gone now. July 11, 2020. The machine he helped build does not pause. [Chorus] The newsroom breathes on a twenty-four hour lung. The hum of the servers is its resting heart rate. Monitors flicker with datelines from places you cannot pronounce. The teletype chatter is the building's own pulse. There is no deadline here. There is only the feed. [Outro] The air is always seventy degrees. The light is always on. Somewhere in the building, a red light blinks. Live. From Atlanta.