On June 30, 2020, WarnerMedia confirmed what many in downtown Atlanta had feared for years: CNN Center, the building that had defined the corner of Marietta Street and Centennial Olympic Park Drive since 1976, was being put up for sale.
Pascal Desroches, WarnerMedia's chief financial officer, delivered the news in a company-wide email. "The best course of action is to sell the CNN Center," he wrote, citing downtown Atlanta's growth as an entertainment destination that made the property attractive to specialized developers.
More Than a Building
For anyone who lived or worked in downtown Atlanta between 1980 and 2020, CNN Center was not just a corporate address. It was the building where Ted Turner launched a 24-hour news network that the industry said would never work. It was where journalists covered the O.J. Simpson verdict, the September 11 attacks, and every presidential election in between. It was where CNN.com pioneered 24-hour live streaming news before most Americans had broadband.
The fifth-floor newsroom — the largest digital newsroom in the world at its peak, with more than 100 CNN.com journalists — was where reporters scrambled on the morning of September 11, 2001, coordinating coverage across a global network while smoke rose from Lower Manhattan on every screen.
For the overnight crews, the people who kept the network alive between midnight and dawn, CNN Center was something more personal. Ed Payne, a longtime overnight producer, told GPB he "wasn't surprised" by the sale announcement — production operations had been migrating to New York for over a decade — but the finality still stung.
The Gulch and What Comes Next
The timing of the announcement was notable. On the same day, Georgia's Supreme Court approved the multibillion-dollar Gulch development directly across the street from CNN Center — a mixed-use project that would bring hotels, offices, apartments, and retail to one of downtown's most conspicuous gaps. The two announcements together signaled a pivot point for the district: the old anchor was leaving, but new investment was arriving.
WarnerMedia projected the sale process would take several years. Most CNN employees would consolidate at the company's Techwood campus in Midtown Atlanta. Desroches paid tribute to Ted Turner in his email, noting that Turner "reinvented media when he launched the 24-hour news channel in 1980."
The building would eventually reopen as The CTR in May 2026 — reimagined as a mixed-use landmark with restaurants, murals from Atlanta artists, and residential floors. But in June 2020, that future was still unknown. What was clear was that downtown Atlanta was losing the tenant that had given it a global identity, and the question of what would replace that identity was wide open.
Original reporting by Wayne Drash, Georgia Public Broadcasting, June 30, 2020.