The news business used to operate on banker's hours, more or less. The evening anchors delivered the day's events at 6:30, the morning papers arrived with yesterday's certainties, and the rest of the time belonged to other pursuits. Ted Turner, who died this week at 86, found this arrangement insufficiently urgent.

Mr. Turner's creation of CNN in 1980 was, in the parlance of the era, a bold bet — though calling it bold understates the degree to which the broadcasting establishment considered it preposterous. A 24-hour news channel based in Atlanta, staffed largely by people who had not attended the customary journalism finishing schools, seemed to many observers like an expensive way to fill airtime with whatever happened to be happening. (Which, as it turned out, was precisely the point.)

The Gulf War provided CNN's proof of concept, if proof were needed by then. Viewers watched events as they occurred rather than as they were later summarized, a shift that now seems so obvious it is difficult to remember that someone had to think of it first.

"Ted Turner's vision for 24-hour cable news transformed the media industry and gave viewers everywhere a front seat to witness history unfold," said Rupert Murdoch, a man who has been known to appreciate a transformative bet or two himself.

The legacy, of course, is complicated in ways that Mr. Turner might not have anticipated. The flood of news he unleashed has become a torrent, then a deluge, and the line between reporting and opining has grown rather difficult to locate. CNN itself has passed through several corporate hands since Mr. Turner's departure and is about to pass through another, with David Ellison's Paramount waiting in the wings.

But the core proposition — that people should not have to wait for an appointed hour to learn what is happening in the world — has only grown more entrenched, even as the screens have multiplied and shrunk.

Mr. Turner, one suspects, would have found the current media landscape both vindicating and exhausting, though he was not, by most accounts, a man who exhausted easily.

Original story published in The Hollywood Reporter: "Ted Turner Created the 24-Hour News Cycle, Keeping the World More Informed and More Stressed"