My summer at CNN

I was 22 in the summer of 1997, working as an unpaid intern at CNN in Manhattan. I lived in my older cousin's spare bedroom on the Lower East Side and took the subway to 5 Penn Plaza every morning.

This was before AOL bought Time Warner. This was before cable news became the performance art hellscape it is now.

A recent grad from McGill University, I was hired to work in the PR department. My primary responsibility was reading newspapers and physically cutting out any article that mentioned CNN. I'd show up, take the elevator to the 19th floor, and spend two hours with scissors and a stack of papers. It was the kind of work that would be automated out of existence within five years.