Rosemary Pennington | Nov. 6, 2007
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| Photo by Crista Chapman |
| NBC’s Bob Dotson told students to be great storytellers. "I try to do stories that have a lot of layers, like onions. You want a dramatic arc in your stories; you want them to grow.” |
“Let people fill the silence,” Dotson said. “People hate silence.”
More than 50 people filled Ernie Pyle Auditorium to hear Dotson’s talk, “A Survival Kit for Professional Storytellers: How to compete with cell phones and Web sites.” His message? The only real way to compete is to just be a good storyteller, and part of storytelling is to let people do the talking.
“We lose sight in journalism of what we learned in English,” Dotson said as he described the nuts and bolts of dramatic writing: scene setting, foreshadowing, conflict, character development and resolution. “You don’t want to drain the drama.”
The veteran TV journalist spent all day talking to students in associate professor Mike Conway’s J520 Video Storytelling and J410 Media as Social Institutions classes before giving his evening lecture.
“I have a new-found respect for the teachers,” Dotson said to a group of students sitting in the front row before the talk officially began. “I’ve been talking since 9 this morning. TV reporters run out of things to say after a minute 30.”
Dotson’s been working within that minute 30 framework for the last 40 years, 30 of them with NBC News. During those years, he’s managed to turn a time limit that many journalists find restrictive into a minute and a half of creativity.
That ability is one of the reasons School of Journalism assistant professor Mike Conway invited Dotson to campus. Conway launched the graduate video storytelling class just this school year and decided early on that he was going to invite professionals who excelled in the medium to speak to students about how to create great video. Bob Dotson topped the list.
“He’s a master storyteller,” Conway said. “Many of us in the business look at his work as the pinnacle of what you can do with storytelling.”
Sitting in Ernie Pyle Auditorium, Dotson shared five such stories with the audience. One was about a former homeless drug addict who became an opera star in New York; another focused on a group of Kansas teenagers who saved a Polish woman’s WWII legacy from being lost forever.
The stories had the same thing in common. In the matter of just a few minutes, Dotson was able to turn what could be a mundane story in another reporter’s hands into a piece viewers can’t stop watching.
“I try to do stories that have a lot of layers,” Dotson said, “like onions. You want a dramatic arc in your stories; you want them to grow.”
Reporters can dig up those stories, in part, by tossing aside that sacred cow of journalism, the questions all young journalists are taught to think about, the five Ws: who, what, when, where and why.
“Remember ‘hey, you, see, so,’” Dotson told the students in the audience. “’Hey’ gets the audience’s attention. ‘You, the audience ought to relate immediately. ‘See’ is two or three facts people don’t know, or two or three things you’ve noticed about the facts of your story. And ‘so’ is ‘So why should you care?’”
It’s not just stories that are onion-like, Dotson said, but the news business is as well. It’s no longer enough to simply want to write or take pictures or edit sound, you have to be able to do it all to get ahead.
“We stand at a rare crossroads in our business,” Dotson said, talking of the convergence of print, visual and audio journalism. “They’re all building blocks to tell a story. None is more important than the other.”
Master’s student Rishika Murthy, who is not in Conway’s class, took a lot of what Dotson said to heart.
“The silence thing kind of got me,” Murthy said. “The idea that if you rush to fill the silence, you’re not doing your job.”
Murthy, who has worked as a print reporter and is trying her hand at radio, isn’t sure where the profession will take her after graduate school. That’s just fine, Dotson said. Murthy, and others like her, don’t have to worry about defining themselves in the craft.
“Just tell ’em you’re a storyteller,” he said.
The veteran TV journalist spent all day talking to students in associate professor Mike Conway’s J520 Video Storytelling and J410 Media as Social Institutions classes before giving his evening lecture.
“I have a new-found respect for the teachers,” Dotson said to a group of students sitting in the front row before the talk officially began. “I’ve been talking since 9 this morning. TV reporters run out of things to say after a minute 30.”
Dotson’s been working within that minute 30 framework for the last 40 years, 30 of them with NBC News. During those years, he’s managed to turn a time limit that many journalists find restrictive into a minute and a half of creativity.
That ability is one of the reasons School of Journalism assistant professor Mike Conway invited Dotson to campus. Conway launched the graduate video storytelling class just this school year and decided early on that he was going to invite professionals who excelled in the medium to speak to students about how to create great video. Bob Dotson topped the list.
“He’s a master storyteller,” Conway said. “Many of us in the business look at his work as the pinnacle of what you can do with storytelling.”
Sitting in Ernie Pyle Auditorium, Dotson shared five such stories with the audience. One was about a former homeless drug addict who became an opera star in New York; another focused on a group of Kansas teenagers who saved a Polish woman’s WWII legacy from being lost forever.
The stories had the same thing in common. In the matter of just a few minutes, Dotson was able to turn what could be a mundane story in another reporter’s hands into a piece viewers can’t stop watching.
“I try to do stories that have a lot of layers,” Dotson said, “like onions. You want a dramatic arc in your stories; you want them to grow.”
 |
| Photo by Crista Chapman |
| Instead of the five Ws, Dotson uses "hey, you, see, so" to guide his storytelling. |
“Remember ‘hey, you, see, so,’” Dotson told the students in the audience. “’Hey’ gets the audience’s attention. ‘You, the audience ought to relate immediately. ‘See’ is two or three facts people don’t know, or two or three things you’ve noticed about the facts of your story. And ‘so’ is ‘So why should you care?’”
It’s not just stories that are onion-like, Dotson said, but the news business is as well. It’s no longer enough to simply want to write or take pictures or edit sound, you have to be able to do it all to get ahead.
“We stand at a rare crossroads in our business,” Dotson said, talking of the convergence of print, visual and audio journalism. “They’re all building blocks to tell a story. None is more important than the other.”
Master’s student Rishika Murthy, who is not in Conway’s class, took a lot of what Dotson said to heart.
“The silence thing kind of got me,” Murthy said. “The idea that if you rush to fill the silence, you’re not doing your job.”
Murthy, who has worked as a print reporter and is trying her hand at radio, isn’t sure where the profession will take her after graduate school. That’s just fine, Dotson said. Murthy, and others like her, don’t have to worry about defining themselves in the craft.
“Just tell ’em you’re a storyteller,” he said.
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