Lobby area in the CNN center

Walking into CNN, I felt a sense of excitement. I felt ready and eager to begin my career. Even though I won’t be going into news, I still liked being in a professional environment with such accomplished people.

When we started the tour, Monte Plott, tour guide and Digital News Editor at CNN, told us the history of the CNN building and mentioned that it used to be the world’s only indoor amusement park.

The first place we visited was the newsroom. There were tons of, with people researching national and international stories for the next headlines to report. Here, Plott said that they produce 40-to-50 stories a day.

From there the tour became more in-depth. We visited the control room, where we could see everything on-air at that moment. Plott said the control room functions as the brain center for programming, ensuring that the news anchors stay on-script. We saw this process live with Wolf Blitzer.

Overall, the tour was great and informative and I felt lucky to be able to learn so much from a seasoned journalist. When asked if he had any sage words for us, Plott said, “The only thing we (journalists) have going for us is credibility. If we lose that — if get things wrong, doesn’t matter why or how we got them wrong, just that we screwed up — then we’re out of business.”