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CNN Headline News did not invent the news wheel, it only compressed it.
The service is quietly celebrating its 20th anniversary this year in much the same manner in which it has existed for the past two decades-beneath the radar of all but its most ardent fans and comfortably in the shadow of its much bigger and more public sibling.
While the battle for cable network news supremacy takes place in a loud and public forum, Headline News ambles along, doing what it does: provide a quick, concise update of news and information. Copious yet succinct is clearly the operative phrase here.
"We are a refuge for all the people who are sated with all the opinion-driven all-news channels," said veteran Headline News anchor Chuck Roberts of his home for the past 21 years. "Just the facts. We have never deviated from that."
Looking back on the cable television environment of 1982, it's hard to imagine how CNN2-the original moniker for Headline News-ever made it onto television, much less survived this long.
Created as a defensive strategy against a competing service, CNN2 was assembled in rush fashion in the summer of 1981, though Ted Turner first broached the concept a year earlier.
"In November of 1980, Ted and I were with our wives at a birthday dinner, and he asked me if I thought we might have a competitor [to CNN] someday, and I said yes," recalled CNN co-founder Reese Schonfeld. Mr. Turner instructed Mr. Schonfeld to put together a plan and a proposed budget for a headline news service.
"He didn't even look at it. He just stuffed it into a desk drawer," Mr. Schonfeld said. "Later, when we heard about Satellite News Channel, he pulled the plan out of his desk and said, 'Do it."'
The big story of the day in cable was not the two-year-old, still struggling CNN. Rather it was the imminent launch of Satellite News Channel, the proposed 24-hour service from Westinghouse Broadcasting Corp.'s Group W Satellite Communications and ABC Video Enterprises, two organizations with pockets sufficiently deep to threaten the very existence of both CNN and the entire Turner Broadcasting System.
TBS at the time was on shaky financial footing, and Mr. Turner was looking for every...