By Rebecca Reardon, GSU

View of CNN Center from ground floor

On a blustery day in Atlanta, my journalism class met promptly at 9 a.m. in the CNN center lobby.  CNN digital news editor, Monte Plott was our tour guide for the morning. We were then ushered through security and received ID badges. After a long ride up the escalator, I gazed up at the vast space. There are so many floors, flags and monitors to see, but it is the large sculpture of planet earth that draws the eye. It makes you feel as if the world is at your fingertips.

Plott first took us to the Headline News (HLN) broadcast viewing center where we watched in real time where the morning talk show takes place. He explained how each camera is manipulated from the control room and that there was typically only one producer in the studio to move content, cue breaks, and direct new segments.

Following HLN, we headed to the national newsroom where there were rows upon rows of cubicles. Each represents a specific department of the national news, with four or five people stationed at all times. It was organized chaos. We witnessed working content -a press release for an event that occurred at the Paddington, London train station up on the monitors of the newsroom.

Just around the corner from the newsroom was the control room. There were just a handful of people in it and what looked like millions of dollars worth of equipment, panels and monitors. These were the employees controlling the camera angles, commercial breaks, and cutting from one reporter to another. Plott described it as one of the most stressful positions for news broadcasting. We then visited the international broadcast room, CNN Español, and the sports broadcast room.

Plott was a gracious tour guide and truly made us feel like we too were part of the CNN reporting team. He gave us advice on how to break into the industry saying, “You just have to get in somewhere, I started out at a local newspaper in North Carolina. Start by getting internships and building a solid portfolio of work”. This has been one of my favorite course assignments here at Georgia State and one I feel solidified my passion for journalism.