THE SITUATION ROOM CNN uses digital technology to enhance show's coverage

It first used a similar format the night of the 2004 presidential election.
NEW YORK (AP) -- The first time you see CNN's "The Situation Room," it might give you a headache. What's the deal with that array of TV screens, all those images tiled across that video wall? Why is so much happening at once? Where's the aspirin?
Then it starts to make sense, even feel familiar. The PC that's part of your daily life has now inspired a TV newscast. On "The Situation Room," you're met with something like a huge computer desktop. (Not just one, in fact, but two of these video walls, the larger of them 13 feet across.)
Helping you navigate is host Wolf Blitzer, who interacts with this stream of live and taped dispatches, of correspondents and interview subjects, of maps and other graphics, from his command post at CNN's Washington bureau.
"The Situation Room" was introduced in early August and airs weekdays 4 to 6 p.m. and 7 to 8 p.m. And it works, taking TV news somewhere that may strike you as not only groundbreaking -- but also overdue in the Internet era.
"It's a nonlinear way of expressing information in a linear medium," says CNN President Jonathan Klein. "It's all right there on your 'desktop,' and then we single out individual stories for greater attention."
How it started
A former CBS News executive and Web site entrepreneur, Klein began developing "The Situation Room" upon his arrival at CNN last December.
"With cable news up to then, the approach had been like a peanut butter sandwich," he says. "Take a nice thick dollop and then just spread it thin across the day. But we wondered: What if you were to gather a strike force and concentrate your fire?"
CNN's Washington Bureau Chief David Bohrman had already masterminded what turned out to be a "Situation Room" dry run: Election Night 2004, which CNN aired from the Nasdaq "MarketSite" studio in Times Square, making maximum use of its room-length TV wall.
Bohrman was executive producer of that coverage. Then he set to work adapting it for the daily newscast Klein envisioned. "We wanted to use the wall as an engine to invigorate the program," Bohrman says. There would be multiple video feeds, different views, behind-the-scenes transparency to show news gathering in action -- all at the same time.
'No going back'
Blitzer, who had anchored on Election Night, was enthusiastic about the "Situation Room" concept -- with one caveat: "I wanted to make sure that the technology strengthened our editorial product, not undermined it. But now that we're on the air, I think it's giving the viewer a whole new dimension of the news."
The program, he says, "is still a work in progress. But there's no going back, as far as I'm concerned."
It certainly goes counter to one trend in TV for more than a decade -- since NBC's "Today" introduced its windows-enclosed studio in 1994. What could anybody learn looking through those windows? No one thought to ask. No one cared. The timing just seemed right for a TV show to come out of hiding and coexist with the real world of its viewers (or pretend to, anyway).
A throwback to the nearby Rockefeller Center storefront where "Today" had premiered in 1952, Studio 1A played a big role in the show's 10-years-and-counting reign as ratings champ. So "no panes, no gains" became the rule, and rival morning shows accessorized with windows of their own.
Of course, people still gather to peer through panes of glass at TV anchors. But that sort of literal transparency doesn't count for much in a virtual world. Besides, these days you can interact online with Matt and Katie and anybody else in cyberspace. The windowed studio is still there at "Today," "Good Morning America" and other shows -- but mostly reminiscent of a half-century ago.
Early response to the show seems auspicious for CNN, long a ratings also-ran to Fox News Channel. "The Situation Room" has brought CNN growth among younger adults, even logging first-place status in the 4-to-6 p.m. time slot in the 18-to-34 demographic.