ATVN Through the Years
Video by Marc Sallinger
As the USC community continues to celebrate the opening of Wallis Annenberg Hall, many students are also celebrating one of Annenberg's most unique and celebrated features: Annenberg Television News, or ATVN.
Sixteen years ago, Joe Saltzman would not have been able to imagine beginning ATVN in the state of the art media center that it now functions in.
"We had the idea of doing a television newscast, but the problem was that we had no facilities and no way to do it and no money. In the beginning, I didn't think it was possible."
Saltzman, the man who began the school's broadcast journalism program, started ATVN in Studio B of the Hancock Building. ATVN continued to air out of the Hancock building until this past August, before everything was transformed into working out of the new media center in Wallis Annenberg Hall.
"This is like a miracle," Saltzman says, "Who could ever have envisioned this back in the 20th century? Impossible."
