Andy: Everyone in the entire building seemed oblivious to the mobs of us turistas. I kept hoping we
could see some famous anchor chasing his secretary around his desk, providing prime blackmail fodder for me and my trusty
camera.
With our little CNN tour pass cum luggage tags in hand, we made our way up the 8-story escalator. Each floor of the CNN building is a different part of the CNN empire. One floor is for CNN.com, one is for Headline News, one is for the CNN/Sports Illustrated joint venture CNN/si, etc etc. As we went up the escalator, we could voyeuristically peer into the offices as we passed the windows.
Andy: Everyone in the entire building seemed oblivious to the mobs of us turistas. I kept hoping we
could see some famous anchor chasing his secretary around his desk, providing prime blackmail fodder for me and my trusty
camera.
At the top of the atrium, another roomful of Turner/CNN promotion reminded us how wonderful Ted is. After that, a short film with gratuitous James Earl Jones usage made sure we understood JUST HOW GREAT Turner Broadcasting is.
After we got to the actual meat of the tour, it was pretty cool. The first stop was what they called the "Special Effects", but was
really just an explanation of how teleprompters and Chromakey work.
Our tour guide, Matt, was pretty corny and hokey, but that was to be expected. He had a small girl
stand up on camera and read the news off of a teleprompter. She even managed to blithely say "This is Insert Name reporting", twice!
Call Art Linkletter!
Matt pointed out something that we'd never noticed before: Weathermen always wave their hands around at a region of the map behind them because they can't actually see the map, and if they pointed to a specific place, they'd probably be wrong.
After the special effects, we couldn't take any more pictures, so we can't bring the views of the CNN newsroom or where they make the graphics or anything like that, but the newsroom looks just like it does on TV, only from the air, and the rest were pretty non-photographic.
Andy: After the tour ended (at the Turner Store, natch), I had to go find the cnn.com floor. We couldn't see any signs
that said "Massive outgoing T-3s" or "Bigass server room", but I know they were in there somewhere.
We waved bye-bye to Ted's empire, but we couldn't leave. Why? Turn to:
The rest of Atlanta