Ted Turner and Me, Part II

Pat Mitchell, Dr. Denis Mukwege, Elizabeth Dewberry, Ted Turner

OK

By popular demand, the continuation of the Ted Turner story.

So at the end of the meeting in New York, Ted turned to me and said, ‘You go down to Atlanta and see Pat Mitchell’,

and then smacked me a few times.

Needless to say, I thought I was ‘in’.

To get CNN as a client would be a massive coup. And Turner had bought into it.

So I got on the first flight to Atlanta the next morning and grabbed a cab over to CNN headquarters.

Mitchell ran CNN’s operation, so she had a big office.

In fact, it was two offices, outer and inner.

She met me in the outer office and she was all smiles and sunshine. Then she invited me into her inner office.

Great!, I thought, I could deal with Atlanta….

As soon as she closed to the door however she spun around.  There were like lightning bolts coming out of where her eyes once were.

“How did you get to him?” she demanded.

“I… I… um….” (well, I was a bit taken aback.

She repeated the question. This time more slowly.

“How did you get to him”?

“I wrote him a letter”.

She took a moment to digest this important piece of information.

OK. I wasn’t particularly connected to anyone. I hadn’t been introduced by another billionaire or a board member of someone important.

I was just what I appeared to be…

unimportant.

She seemed to relax a bit. She was back in control.

“Well”, she said, “I know all about what you’re doing, and we’re not doing it at CNN”.

“You’re not?” I asked.

“No”, she said.  “We’re beta”.

In those days we were still doing VJs with Hi8.

“Beta Beta Beta”.

I could have been in a chapter of Brave New World.

“Beta”. “Have you seen our facility here?”

She arranged for me to have a tour.

Great.

When I got back to NY, I called Turner.

“Well, I can’t maker her do what she don’t want to do” he said, and wished me good luck.

And that… was that.
Which was too bad.

CNN would have been an interesting target for the VJ model. Perfect in fact.

But as Ted Turner said, ‘you can’t make a person do what they don’t want to do’.

Fortunately (for me) The BBC felt otherwise.

Now, of course, CNN is dipping their toe in the whole VJ thing, both with having a few of their reporters shoot and cut their own stuff, and of course, iReport.

There’s even a piece here on the CNN site explaining how iReporters can use the new iPhone and iMovie functions.

Well, better late than never.

But it’s pretty remarkable to me that CNN, which was once so much on the cutting edge of news and new technology is today more then 8-track of video journalism.

Too bad.