Fox News Channel’s First On-Air Hire Recalls Humble Basement Studio as Network Marks 30 Years

Fox News Channel is marking its 30th anniversary this year, and the network’s first on-air hire, Lauren Green, is offering a firsthand account of its earliest days in New York City.

Green writes that her official start date was August 5, 1996, nearly two months before Fox News Channel’s first broadcast. Weeks before that, she traveled to New York City with her mother to look for an apartment and was given a tour of what would become the network’s newsroom, located in a basement space referred to internally as C-1.

According to Green, the space was gutted down to the studs at the time and being rebuilt as the channel’s operational center. In those early weeks, she and a small group of producers and writers practiced running newscasts, testing a format built around seven-minute news segments at the top and bottom of each hour. The crew eventually moved to a rented off-site studio to get better access to cameras and equipment ahead of launch.

Green describes the original anchor setup as a plywood board resting on two sawhorses, with a single camera and no prompter, run out of a small office near the construction site.

She also recalls the cultural backdrop of that summer: the release of