Pike, Sidney

SIDNEY PIKE is the retired President of CNN-International Special Projects. He worked for Ted Turner for 25 years (1971-1996). He was Station Manager of WTBS (1971-80). When the UHF-TV station was about to go bankrupt in 1970, Sid Pike stepped in and made it profitable. He led Turner to the purchase of the Atlanta Braves baseball and Atlanta Hawks basketball teams. Pike also saved the WRET-TV station in Charlotte, NC, which Turner later sold for $21 million, generating the seed money for CNN. Turner was the visionary risk-taker, but Pike built CNN International through his persistent globetrotting.

After graduating from high school in 1944 Pike joined the Army, working with USOs in Europe. In 1947 he returned to Worcester, Massachussets and studied at Clark University. He worked as a talent scout in New York in 1949 and in 1950 was hired by WBZ-TV in Boston to direct baseball programming. After a 17-year career in television in Boston, he moved to Atlanta to become Station Manager of WQXI-TV. He met Ted Turner there in 1971.

Pike has served on the Board of Advisors of several major universities, the Board of the Marshall McLuhan Center on Global Communications, the International Foundation for Global Studies (Avignon, France), and as CEO of the National Education Telecommunications Organization in Washington, D.C.