After a early morning wake-up call and some general confusion on the way to New York City, Mrs. Eisenman’s Journalism class and editors from the Wildcat Word toured Fox News Studios on Tuesday, November 16. They got a close-up view of the morning show as it was being taped live and met several hosts from Fox and Friends, as well as Jets Quarterback Mark Sanchez, who was in the studio for an interview.

Waking before 5 a.m. and traveling more than two hours made the morning stressful for many involved.

The bus arrived late, got lost, and went to the wrong train station. “I was worried we weren’t going to make it on time,” Mrs. Eisenman confessed. The class arrived in New York around 8 a.m. and at Fox Studios around 8:30 for their tour, just as the Fox and Friends was finishing for the day.

Watching from the control room, the group got an inside look at the mechanics of making a morning show. Being responsible for an array of monitors and mixers make being a producer a high-risk job, particularly at Fox and Friends, which is the most viewed morning show in America. The control room impressed the students. “I expected it to be just one producer, but I was surprised that it was several technicians.,” said sophomore Jordan Kuwalicz, “Once you learned what you are doing it looks like it would be a lot of fun.”

After seeing Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez advertising a workout game for Microsoft’s new Kinect attachment for the Xbox 360, the group headed down to the studio where the internet after-show was being filmed live. A brief acknowledgement and a few lucky handshakes with the quarterback later, the group was left alone with Gretchen Carlson and her cameraman. Without paying any attention to the group, Carlson enthusiastically gave a teaser for what was coming up next on Fox. Lily Ziegler, a sophomore, was fascinated by the studio: “I was surprised when I first walked into the studio room, wondering how the room that looked so big on TV could be so small in real life.”

From there the students toured the rest of the studio, meeting some of the writers and getting a general feel of the job from information given by other staff members. For some, the job starts as early as midnight, giving most people in the morning show nocturnal schedules. While a normal person would stay up late to go out with friends, producers on the show actually get up as early as 9 PM to spend a late night with friends and family. “It’s crazy how peoples’ jobs become their whole life. It’s really altered their life and I feel bad about how committed they have to be, it’s seems well worth it but exhausting,” said Jack Moriarty, a junior.

Afterwards the students stopped in Rockerfeller Square for a lunch break, an exciting venture with a delicious Chipotle ending for a lucky few. Students arrived back at school around 3 PM.