‘I Think Viewers Are Going To Be Surprised’

When CNN’s Boris Sanchez debuts in his new role as co-anchor of CNN News Central Monday afternoon alongside Jim Sciutto and Brianna Keilar, he’s determined not just to get viewers to turn on CNN—he wants them to actually watch. “A lot of our viewers have us on in the background,” Sanchez told me. “I think one of the goals that we had laying out our ambition for (CNN News Central) is to make sure that we’re giving viewers a reason to look up, and if they’re channel surfing to stop and say what is that because it’s something they haven’t seen before.”

The format—inspired by CNN’s coverage of major events like election night—features anchors freed from the anchor desk so they can move around a huge studio outfitted with state-of-the-art “technology and storytelling tools,” as the network described it back in January, saying “the immersive approach will showcase what CNN does best—breaking news, visual storytelling, and factual, impactful reporting.”

For Sanchez, a longtime correspondent who has been anchoring CNN New Day on weekend mornings, the new format gives him the room to bring more of his talents as a reporter into the studio. “Most of my career I’ve spent reporting from all sorts of natural disasters and terrorist attacks,” Sanchez told me. “And being able to be a tour guide for the viewer, and bring them into a scene after a hurricane or after a shooting and literally take a viewer into a scene that they can’t access and give them proximity and detail and texture is huge. And now, with the new set that we have, you’re able to take that experience of being somewhere and do that in the studio with these enormous walls of flying graphics, and color and numbers and detail. And so I love that what I enjoy doing most in the field, I’m now getting to do in the studio.”

Sanchez joins an evolving CNN lineup that has , first with the debut of CNN This Morning, which features Don Lemon, Kaitlan Collins and Poppy Harlow. The format expanded April 3 with a three-hour morning block of CNN News Central anchored by John Berman, Kate Bolduan and Sara Sidner. Sanchez says he and his co-anchors bring unique talents—such as Sciutto’s expertise in national security and Bolduan’s ability to force elected officials off their talking points—that will serve viewers in the new format. “I think the viewers are going to be surprised by how much of that (expertise) translates to them getting value out of what they’re watching and actually having to look up at the screen to really get a feel for what we’re doing,” he told me. “And because we have so much real estate in the studio and with reporters that know what they’re talking about, we’re going deeper into stories.”

For Sanchez, whose family escaped Cuba when he was three years old, journalism is more than a job. “This is personal,” he told me. “When my family came to the United States, and landed in Miami, the day that I turned three, that idea that democracy is something worth fighting for that it is something you must protect, that it is worthy of sacrifice, has always stuck with me. My mother wanted to be a journalist when she was growing up, she loved the writing.” And she passed that love on to her grandson. “I love writing, I love telling stories, I love going out and talking to interesting people and experiencing everything that the world has to offer.”

“But this is something personal,” Sanchez said. “I’ve been given a platform to speak for people that are underrepresented, and to again, defend democracy. And that’s not something I take lightly.”