STEVE ROBINSON, MANAGING EDITOR, CNN/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED: The marriage of CNN and "Sports Illustrated" was really envisioned as a way of creating a 24-hour sports news channel that would take advantage of CNN's global news gathering capabilities and the journalism of "Sports Illustrated" magazine.</s>NICK CHARLES, CNNSI ANCHOR: Hello, everybody, and welcome to CNN/"Sports Illustrated" and we are thrilled at the prospect and the challenge of sports news with depth around the clock.</s>ROBINSON: We built a totally state-of-the-art studio. And on that first night, on December 12th, we had some bugs, but the content was terrific. It represented really the best of what we hoped to put forward on a 24-hour basis.</s>CHARLES: It appears certain now Cal Ripken will move from short to third.</s>ROBINSON: Our priority is news. People know that when they turn on the channel, any hour of the day or night, that they're going to find out quickly what the sport news of the day is. One of the things that makes sports television so compelling is storytelling, and our storytelling is one of the things we do best.</s>UNIDENTIFIED CNNSI CORRESPONDENT: One of those things that doesn't show up with in the box scores is heart, and Jim Leland talked about that.</s>ROBINSON: We're very much at the forefront of the convergence between the Web and television. It's something that we've aggressively pursued. CNNsi.com and CNN/"Sports Illustrated" the channel are really inseparable. And what we're bringing is the interactive capability that the Web brings to television, and we really feel we are in the forefront of that.
CNN 20: CNN/SI Debuts, December 12, 1996