Aaron Brown: CNN anchor Aaron Brown is covering the nightly news his way, and for a growing number of viewers that's the best news they've had all day

BRAD GOLDFARB: Legend has it that your first day on the job at CNN was September 11, 2001, and that the events of that day began to unfold as you were heading into work.

AARON BROWN: Yeah, that's the myth. In fact, I'd gone on the payroll the previous July. We were hiring people and designing a show [which would become NewsNight With Aaron Brown]. As I was driving in, David Borhman, the show's senior executive producer, called me in the car and said that a plane had hit the north tower and that he was going to the control room. The conversation didn't need to go longer than that--I knew that we were going on the air. Soon after I heard on the radio that the second tower had been hit and I knew that the country had been attacked. A lot of the rest of the ten-minute window is a little blurry for me, but I remember thinking, Did I shave? Do I have a shirt in the office? and then, What am I going to do with the car? Later, as I was running across Eighth Avenue I remember stopping in the middle of the street and thinking [long pause] Calm down. And it was as if this wave of calm descended on me. I finished walking across the street, walked into the building, put on a different shi rt and tie, grabbed a coat, went upstairs and was on TV five or six minutes later. People still come up to me and tell me they appreciate how calm I was.

BG: Did you have any inkling how important your coverage was going to be for people?

AB: I certainly knew that this was the most important story I would ever do--that everything that day and in the months that would follow would be the lead in my professional life.

BG: It's been suggested that one reason viewers connect with you is the humanness of your on-air presentation.

AB: To me a broadcast is just a conversation that I have with viewers. I know that sometimes people want the presentation to be more formal or more urgent or authoritative, but for better or worse, this is the kind of anchor that I am.

BG: Was covering the news a lifelong dream?

AB: This job was it for me. As a kid I was a horrible student, I didn't understand geometry or math or much of anything else, but I got the news. I grew up in a small town outside of Minneapolis and I used to listen to this guy on the radio named Cedric Adams do the ten o'clock newscast. By the sixth grade I knew I wanted to be a reporter, and I was putting out this dinky little neighborhood paper called the Norwood Gazette. We had this family friend who worked in the newspaper business in Minneapolis--I was around there from time to time and I just thought it was so cool.

BG: When did you shift to television?

AB: When I was fifteen and President Kennedy was assassinated. I was watching Mr. Cronkite and I remember saying to my mom that that was the job I wanted to do. With its nonstop coverage and the anchor serving as both journalist and community center, TV news was really born that weekend.

BG: Did you go to journalism school?

AB: No. I did two doses of college. For about a year each, at the University of Minnesota. The first time I was looking for girls. When I returned I took a journalism class and there was a professor who said to me, look, I just don't think you have the skills a good reporter needs. And rather than see you waste your time and be disappointed, I thought I should tell you. Now I found this particularly odd since I'd already been on the radio doing talk shows in Minneapolis. I mean, 18 years old is a time for hearing if you work hard, you can be whatever you want. But he said I should think about it. So I did, and ultimately I dropped out.

BG: I hope you've sent him an autographed picture.

AB: Actually, I went back there last spring to talk to the journalism students and, without naming him, I told them the story and I said, look, the point is not that some adults are jerks--you don't need me to tell you that. The point is, you've chosen a line of work that's really hard, one in which even your teachers, your girlfriends, your boyfriends, your parents will doubt your ability to be successful.

BG: You were at ABC for ten years prior to CNN, filling in for anchor Peter Jennings and hosting World News Tonight Saturday. How did it feel when CNN offered you the evening anchor spot?

AB: In some respects I was very surprised because it came out of nowhere and I was under contract with ABC. But on the other hand, I always assumed that I would be, if not the network anchor, then a network anchor. That I'd write programs, that I'd edit programs, that I'd do that job. Even when people were telling me that I'd never make it I'd say, "Well, thanks a lot, but I'm not interested in hearing that."

BG: When you arrived at CNN did you know what you wanted NewsNight to be?

AB: I had a pretty good idea. David Borhman and I had done the overnight [World News Now] at ABC together and we didn't want to do the same thing. We wanted it to be a place for character-driven, beginning-middle-and-end sorts of stories. We wanted the program to be a little quirky in spots. But we also knew the kinds of people we wanted to hire. I look at these guys out there and mostly they're young, and mostly we tell them they'll be great, and that we expect sometimes they'll screw it up. But what we don't want is for them to try to be just okay. I would rather fail than not try.