By: Jonathan Aguilar

A conversation with Bob Dotson

Retired special correspondent for NBC’s “Today Show” Bob Dotson spends his days teaching journalism to students at Syracuse University, but before that for forty years he told the stories of the American people.

In his long running Emmy winning segment on the Today Show called American Story, Dotson dove deep into the lives of people. He was a master at grabbing audience’s attention and making them care about the subjects in his pieces. For him the most important thing was to get people hooked on the people in his stories.

“Go out and find the details the universal buttons as it were that everybody can relate to. That starts with a strong central character, somebody that they care about,” said Dotson.

Making people care about stories is always difficult but it is especially so when first starting in the industry. For Dotson one of the most liberating things he experienced when he began his career was when another reporter told him that that storytelling is a craft you can learn.

“If you learn the craft even if the other person is more talented as a picture maker or writer or whatever, it doesn’t make a difference because the craft will beat them,” he said.

The art of storytelling is so important to Dotson that he wrote a book about it, “Make It Memorable.” In his book he teaches journalists how to write to the corners of the frame and how not to be redundant.

“Fill in what they can’t see, in other words, you give a little background,” he said.

In his book Dotson mentions a story where he covered the aftermath of a tornado. Most reporters would describe to a viewer the destruction they were seeing. What Dotson did, however, was use his other senses to paint a broader picture. He began the report with, “You could smell the path of the storm before you could see it.”

There are often stories that are reported in the same way over and over. To get away from that as a journalist you need to go down the path others haven’t. While covering an event it is easier to write about what is occurring but to make a compelling story it is important to find an interesting character who people can relate to and become invested in.

“It always starts with a strong central character who is struggling to do something,” he noted.

People want to find something they care about and since in society we are constantly bombarded with large figures and broad details on all the bad that is occurring we have become desensitized. By having a strong character in a story, it allows people to relate to what the character is going through. No longer are you talking about a problem as a whole rather you are talking about a problem on an individual level which makes a story much more interesting.

A reporter’s job is to cover the stories their editors have assigned but what a reporter can also do is find those interesting angles that allow people a new insight. When president John F. Kennedy was killed most reporters were in the press pool at his funeral giving a play by play of what they saw but one great reporter decided to take a different approach. The reporter found the man who dug the grave for the president.

“The man did it on overtime the night before and took no overtime for it because that was his gift to the President,” said Dotson.

Stories like the gravedigger’s get people hooked.  “It’s not that the other stuffs bad, but that’s where everybody else is standing,” Dotson said.

Being a good storyteller isn’t about the gear a reporter has, having lots of money to produce content, or being born with stellar visual communication skills. It is about the details and finding ways to capture people’s attention. There are a lot of reporters covering similar stories, the great ones take different paths.

“Try to make yourself one of a kind,” advised Bob Dotson.  “Now you never will be, but the pursuit of that goal will keep you awake for the next 50 years.”

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By Lacey Latch

Rick Bragg learned how to tell a story on dirt roads in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Born poor in rural Alabama to a hardworking mother and alcoholic father, Bragg began to develop the skills that would eventually separate his career from the rest, as he sat and listened to the Braggs that came before him.

“I grew up with the best storytellers on the planet,” Bragg said. “My uncles on both sides of my family could tell you a story and make you hear the footsteps of a deputy chasing through the dark, you know? They could make you hear the change rattling in their pocket. They just knew that you told a story with drama and detail and color.”

Influenced heavily by his family, the foundation of a well-told story was instilled in Bragg early on.

“Whenever they started to talk, I stopped what I was doing and listened,” he said. “So I didn’t know I wanted to be a journalist. It was just, that was the way that you got paid for telling a story.”

Eventually, Bragg’s career would lead him to tell stories around the globe, covering unrest in Haiti, the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombings and the 1998 Jonesboro, Arkansas school shooting among many other things — all the while infusing each story with the poetry that has become known for. Throughout the process, Bragg became a reporter who could add an extra human element to even the most basic hard news stories. Ultimately, what allowed him to do that was a natural ability to get people to share their experiences with him, helping him to collect a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing along the way.

“Over the years, I did a lot of bad news. I did a lot of storms; I did a coup or two, a lot of killing and dying,” he said. “… Getting people to tell you a story was always the secret.”

Now as an instructor at the University of Alabama, Bragg emphasizes the importance of powerful storytelling to young journalists. Storytelling, he says, is the only real way to get the attention of the everyday person.

Admittedly not an expert on topics like geopolitics at home or abroad, Bragg continues to see powerful storytelling as the greatest tool available to him to make a difference. That sentiment carries through to his current position as a columnist for Southern Living, where he published a powerful column in the days following the race-fueled riots in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2018.

“I think if you write about people that are suffering, vividly, you should not be ashamed of that or feel like they’re being exploited,” he said. “That’s the only way to get anyone to give a damn.”

For those on the outside looking in, it may seem as though Bragg succeeded in spite of the circumstances he was born into but Bragg himself sees it quite the opposite. In fact, decades removed from the nights he spent as a child listening intently to the words spoken before him, Bragg attributes all of his storytelling ability directly to his family and childhood.

“Every story I’ve ever told goes right back to the dirt,” Bragg said. “It doesn’t matter if it was in LA or New York or Miami or the Pakistan-Afghanistan border or in Haiti, they all go right back to the dirt and foothills of the Appalachians.”

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By Bianca Cseke

Sandhya Kambhampati knows a thing or two about data journalism.

As a reporter on the Los Angeles Times’ data desk, she covers everything from elections to demographics and how natural disasters affect tourism in small California towns. When she was with Propublica Illinois, Kambhampati helped with an investigation on the Cook County property tax assessment system, a piece that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2018.

But even though nearly all of Kambhampati’s work uses data and public records to get vital information to the public, she never forgets about the people who her stories impact.

“People are always at stake,” she said. “You always want to go back to the people whose lives and livelihoods are impacted.”

For example, the property tax assessment story Kambhampati worked on started with a tip Jason Grotto, the other Propublica reporter she worked with on the story, received from a real person — not from digging through sets of data on a fishing expedition. The reporters also told the stories of people impacted by property tax assessments favoring pricier commercial buildings at the expense of the owners of cheaper ones.

That included Brenda and Larry Doyle, a couple who own a daycare in Chicago’s West Auburn Gresham neighborhood. Their business’s property value was assessed higher than what they had actually paid for it and that value never went down, while a nearby larger, more expensive building kept getting lower assessments.

When asked what a journalism student who’s about to graduate should know about data reporting, Kambhampati said what reporters from every area of journalism have given as advice: Understand how to write a story and how to conduct an interview.

While it can be useful — even vital — to know how to clean data so it can be understandable for reporters and the general population, once that part of the job is done, even a data reporter needs to be able to think in terms of old-fashioned, basic reporting.

“The way you interview people, you want to interview your data,” Kambhampati said.

That means that when a reporter looks at a set of data, they should ask “the same fundamental questions,” such as why the data says something, who is responsible for it and who it affects, how it came to be and what it is truly saying in the first place.

And no matter how much a data journalist immerses themselves in numbers, they should still remember to always include the people affected by the story.

“Don’t bog the story down with too many numbers,” Kambhampati said.

Other than that, aspiring data journalists should remember to send out records requests early on in the reporting process rather than waiting until later, she said. You never know when officials will put up a fight in getting a reporter the information they need.

Plus, that data can take a lot of work to clean up.

“That’s the thing about data: It might be clean in the heads of the people who put it together, but it might not be for everyone else,” Kambhampati said.

By never forgetting about why most journalists do the work they do — to help people — Sandhya Kambhampati has managed to produce work that has made a difference beyond just the awards her work has garnered or been a finalist for, like when she was part of a team that investigated the German nursing home system. That investigation brought about discussion across Germany about how its nursing homes should be evaluated. By following some of Kambhampati’s advice and working to produce journalism that makes a difference, journalists can help change lives for the better.

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