One day trip to Atlanta, Georgia, USA

After spending almost 70 days and nights of what is the coldest winter in Ohio in the past 20 years, I was looking forward to my trip back home to a much warmer India.

From Cleveland I reached Atlanta in the morning of 8th March to catch my flight to Paris before I get the connection to my final destination and home Bangalore. I had almost 8 hours of layover at the Atlanta terminal. I had planned to tour the city in my short time available before I flew out. I was desperate for some outdoor sight seeing because the two months I spent in Ohio were mostly indoors. 

I took the subway train from airport to downtown Atlanta. Believe me I had made no prior plans on list of places to see here. It was only on the subway train that I started searching the must see places online. I short listed 3 places a. Atlanta aquarium , b. CNN studio and c. The Cica cola factory.

From the information I collected online I could see that all of these places were in walking distance of each other. As soon as I stepped outside the train and walked towards the downtown area, I was in for a rather surprise and shock. It was almost 70•F ! Imagine coming from consistent 20s and 30•F of Ohio to this pleasant and warm weather. Trust it was a different feeling altogether to be able to walk freely without having to run to the nearest shelter for warmth. 

My first stop was the Inside CNN studio tour. The tour is for about 2 hours where the tour filicide walks us through the various broadcast related places and gives us a glimpse of how love news is broadcasted to millions of homes in America and abroad. The first thing I learnt was that Atlanta was the founding place and current headquarters of CNN in America. Almost 70% of the content we see on CNN daily is out of this studio. The next big base for CNN is out of New York City.

The guide showed us a live set where a program was about to come live in a few moments. We could hear the producer giving instructions and the go ahead. We were shown multiple screens, current screen which we see in our homes, the advertisements screen and finally the studio screen where the anchor was preparing to go live in few seconds. The guide explained how all these screens are mixed and placed together in a program format so that we get to see a seamless experience of watching live programs without interruptions.

The. Next stop of the studio tour was the reporter desk from where the news readers read the news. We were shown a camera which had a built in tele prompter placed in front of the desk. Now the interesting thing about live news is that they are hardly live! Almost all of the programs have a background preparation time of about 5 to 6 hours to get the script ready. The participants include the anchor , content writers and producers. While reading news the reporter will have a hard copy of the script as well as the assistance of the tele prompter. The tele prompter is tactically placed such that we would feel as though the anchor is making direct eye contact with the camera. The hard copy will be used if the prompter fails.

We were also shown how the weather update works. We get a feeling that the weather reporter is standing against a large screen and providing an update. But in reality, they would be standing against a complete all green screen and the real weather screen is mixed in a computer program and transferred to the live feed. The reporter will have a hidden prompter with indications and cue's for the report. The guide also demonstrated a typical Hollywood trick, where he draped a visitor in green and the person just vanished from the screen!

The final stop was the main control center where the news analyst scanning through all their possible sources to generate one thing - NEWS. They had on display all rival channels along with online sites of various news agencies etc. They use them to compare the information mostly.