CNN anchor John Berman is a Boston guy through and through. He grew up in Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard University, cheers for the Red Sox and ran the Boston Marathon. But his reporting extends far beyond his love of Beantown.
Berman has been a key contributor to the network's coverage of weather and other natural disasters through the years, including Hurricane Irma in 2017. "Apparently I'm good at getting wet," he said.
He recalled that Irma required a lot of ingenuity on the technical side after slamming the Florida Keys. Roads were washed out, and there was no electricity.
Berman and his crew managed to talk a helicopter pilot into flying them from Miami to the Keys, where they landed in the yard of "a friend of a friend." Thinking ahead, they brought a car battery with them — borrowed from a rental vehicle — so they could power the camera and transmit their live shots from the scene.
"I just thought that was the coolest thing I'd ever seen," Berman said. "We were able to convince this helicopter to land in someone's yard and brought this car battery with us so we could cover a hurricane, and that was thrilling. It really was."
Berman's latest assignment has him reporting from the safety and security of the network's Hudson Yards studios in New York City, where he co-anchors the morning edition of "CNN News Central." We caught up with him last week, and the following is an edited version of our conversation.
How has "CNN News Central" been going?
It's three hours of constant movement, and we've had a lot of news since we launched two months ago — to say the least. It has done well with the audience, and internally I think everyone is very pleased with how it looks. The other thing about this show is that it's really production-intensive. It takes a ton of work, and we're in New York obviously, but most of our production team is in Atlanta. Everything you see up on the big screens on the set, it's really complicated for them to get the pictures and graphics in the right place and do everything at the right time. They do incredible work.
What's it like working with Kate Bolduan and Sara Sidner?
Kate and I had previously anchored a show together for a few years, so we have a long history of working really well together. We still have that mental telepathy, and it's just delightful to get to do this with her again. I knew Sara from her years as a reporter and always admired her, mostly from afar, so it has been wonderful to get to work with her in person. The three of us are running around like crazy in this direction and that direction. When the show is over, I feel invigorated — not just from the news, but also from working with such smart and energetic journalists.
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