Bob Dotson advised members of the OU Nightly crew on Thursday to prepare for any eventuality during their careers in journalism by acquiring as many job skills as possible.

“At 22, or 15 or 17, that’s too early to say this is what I want to be, especially if you’re worried about what your job classification is going to be,” he said. “Because the job is going to disappear.”

Dotson told his audience a story about one of the first female journalists he worked with, when he was at WKY-TV (now KFOR). Not only was she trying to break into what Dotson described as the male-dominated world of television journalism in 1969, she also had to use crutches to walk, because of an earlier bout with polio.

Many of Dotson’s co-workers doubted her skills because of her gender. Others questioned whether she could overcome her disability.

“She came in with the curiosity to learn everything she could about journalism. And because of that, she had a meteoric rise, and became a wonderful anchor as well,” Dotson said. “But she didn’t come in saying I want to be the weather girl. She said I want to learn how to light [the set], and I want to know how to do this [and that].”

Matt Pepe, one of the OU Nightly hosts and producers, found Dotson’s words valuable.

“It was good listening to him talk about how you shouldn’t try to be one thing in life,” Pepe said. “You should always aim to learn everything in your entire field.”

Dotson also discussed one of his very first on-air experiences. He was supposed to provide two minutes of Oklahoma-City oriented content as a drop-in for the Today Show. However, his microphone broke as he began his broadcast, causing him to spend most of his two minutes fumbling around for it.

Dotson said his news director greeted him after his miscue with a single sentence. “You know Bob, they don’t pay us to look stupid.”

“It really is inspiring to know that he made it when he wasn’t as good when he was little,” said Melanie Stone, a camerawoman for OU Nightly.

After this story, Dotson told the Nightly crew that they were “light years” ahead of where he was when he began.

The NBC News and Today Show correspondent’s question-and-answer session on the set of OU Nightly came as part of his visit to the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication.

He spoke at a breakfast and to a class Thursday morning, before offering an afternoon speech, open to not just students, but anyone who wanted to listen.

“In the 10:30 [a.m.] session, what he said, which I think is really great that I think people need to always remember is the art of story telling, and that no matter ... whatever the new media is, you must remember the fundamentals of good story telling,” said Alex Shumate, a broadcast journalism graduate student.

Dotson will conclude his visit to Norman today by offering the keynote address at the NewsTrain event, held at the Gaylord College Friday and Saturday. The event is sponsored by the Mid-America Press Institute and is hosted by the Associated Press Managing Editors.

Q&A section

Bob Dotson, a correspondent for the Today Show and NBC News, came to the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication Thursday to talk to journalism students, and members of the university community. Dotson sat down with The Daily’s Charles Ward to discuss his views on story telling, journalism in modern times, and his collection of about 6,000 video cassettes of his reporting, which he donated to the Oklahoma Historical Society and to the Gaylord College.

Q: You talked to the OU Nightly staff about having to a little bit of everything when you first came up. You had to do investigative reporting. You were a field reporter, and an anchor. How did you find your niche as to what you are doing now?

A: I was a kid of the 60s ... In those days, a lot of local stations did original documentaries. So, I had a degree in cinematography and documentary, as well as journalism ... The NBC station here in Oklahoma City, Channel 4, had a documentary department, so that’s how I got started. I came down here to do that and I fell in love with that kind of reporting. So, even when I moved on to other venues, whether it was day-to-day news, or anchoring, or investigative reporting, I used those techniques to try to set my style apart from your basic news coverage, and I’ve done that all along. Over a period of 40 years, it hasn’t been a straight line. You have to keep reinventing yourself to people, because if you have a run of five or six years, where you’re doing nothing but international news, they can’t remember that you did features. And, then if you’re doing features they can’t remember you’ve ever done investigative work, and on and on. It’s a challenge and an opportunity, because, there’s always some new management coming in, so they don’t remember your sins of the past, and you can keep squirreling your way back into stuff you love to do.

Q: The reinventing, is that fun, or do you view that as more of a challenge than it is fun?

A: It’s not fun, but it keeps you awake ... . In this business, you’ve got the same job description all your life, you’re a story teller ... . You can move to bigger markets, you can do different things, but it’s all essentially the same stories. I always thought that geography would be the reason to do what I do, because you get to go around and see a lot of things. What I’ve found after many, many years is I’m remembering the stories by the people who are involved. It didn’t make a difference if they were in Norman, or Lincoln or Alaska. It’s the same thing with reinventing yourself. It keeps you awake, because it’s not a given that you can still go out and have fun every day. So, it keeps you on your toes. And also, the industry keeps changing. Approaches that might work when you were a kid has changed a lot. You change, and then the second time around, you’re doing it with different technology and different deadlines. So, you’re awake.

Q: You talked about geography. You seem to have a little bit of a connection to Oklahoma, not just starting at WKY (TV, now KFOR), but you agreed to give your collection to the journalism school. Is there something in particular about Oklahoma that draws you back?

A: Two things. One is, when I was here, I did 19 documentaries. So, I traveled all over the state, and I met all different kinds of people. So, I got a real sense of this state, and I kind of fell in love with it. And, then I fell in love with one of the girls in this state, and I’m still in love with her, after 40 years. So, I’ve got a lot of relatives in and around Oklahoma City. And then, over a period of 40 years I’ve come back every year but two for the National Press Photographers, which meets here in Norman. So, I found out after many, many years ... Oklahoma is really kind of where I made my bones and got my chops and I have great friends, and I have a lot of history here.

Q: How is the restoration and digitizing and archiving of your collection going?

A: I never owned the copyright to anything, but I saved it all. And, the reason I saved it all is because, when I first started out here in Oklahoma, I got a call from a fire chief in Stillwater. And, they were tearing down one of the original fire stations. And, they found in the attic boxes and boxes of nitrate-based film, which is explosive, old-style film. And, they didn’t know what they had, so they asked me to come up and take a look. It turned out to be the archives of ... an early day ... NewsReel photographer here in Oklahoma from about 1906 to about 1946. And, he was enough of a story teller and curious, that he would shoot stuff he knew couldn’t sell to his folks in New York. So, for instance, he would do stories about black lawmen. Or, stories about women who are not just in swimming suits. Or, stories about Native Americans, not just dancing with feathers ... . So, as a young producer, I found that some of the best stuff was always in somebody’s basement. Because, if you did something you were proud of, the company might have tossed it out after so many years, when they sold the company, but you would have kept a copy ... . Then I started doing kind of this unique beat, and , so I kept it all, first in my basement and then in three warehouses, at my expense ... . Not only did I keep the stories, but I kept every field cassette ... So, [Bob Wright, then president of NBC Universal] came up with $10 million, and he started with my archive ... and [NBC] got it all digitized. So, somebody making minimum wage could, for like a buck-fifty, make an advertiser in Phoenix ... a reel of stuff of what Phoenix looked like in 1975, and sell it to them for $5,000. So, they’re making millions off this thing. So, as a thank you they gave me a copy of every story I ever did, and that is what I, in turn, gave to the University of Oklahoma, because I knew if I kept it, A) you don’t know how long the material is going to last and B) you don’t it to just go back in boxes ... . The stuff that the university has not been digitized, but it’s on state-of-the art video, and so eventually, it will be. We’re trying to figure out how to do all of that. On top of that, I’ve got all the artifacts. I’ve got pictures of some of the things people gave me, and I was able to put all of that in the archive as well.

Q: You mentioned the editing, and keeping, especially the field cassettes. Is that something you think is dying as a teaching tool, is the ability to go back and see how people put stuff together. Not just TV, but writing and stuff like that?

A: The thing that kind of inspired me early on, was I was up at the New York Public Library, and Mrs. John Jacob Astor had more money than God. And she went over, and she bought the rough drafts of some of the most famous first pages in English literature. I remember they put out a display, and it would be like ... Charles Dickens, and the first draft was “It was the best of times, it was OK times.” And then next to it would be whatever the finish was. And, so see the sweat, and how it evolved, as a student, took the mystery away. When I saw Charles Kuralt still anguishing over a sentence, it made sense to me ... . It became great literature, but it didn’t start that way. It started like everything else starts, trial and error. And, so, I thought, because we have all the various stages of development of these stories, then why not use it to teach? ... . All of which, I thought, was a pretty good way of keeping story telling alive, which is what, really, my ultimate goal was. ... . I don’t think I could do what I do and have ego ... . So, this archive is not so that I can say, “Oh, there’s Bob on every screen.” This archive is so that you can see the evolution of how stories are put together. Period. And it’s something we don’t spend a lot of time doing ... . Everything I learned at university is now in the museum. Typewriters. Film. All of it. So, yeah, all of this [new technology] is important for kids to learn, but you can’t lose sight of the fact is that at the heart of it is the story telling. And that really hasn’t changed since the guys went down and killed the mastodon, and came back and painted a picture on the wall on the cave. There’s a reason why one cave was full. It’s because the guy was a good story teller.

Q: You’d talked ... about how the business is always going to be changing. Journalism is always going to be changing. What skills, though, are necessary to remain constant, so no matter what the medium and no matter the way you tell a story ... what skills are just universal?

A: Good writing. A sense of being able to visualize what the story is. Even in writing for written page, the best writers take you into a picture. You read a James Patterson mystery, and you’re in a picture. You read one of the top 10 books, it’s visual ... . No matter what it is, there are three elements that never change: the written word, pictures and sound. And now, of course, with convergence on the Internet you can use them all. I think where the Internet falls down terribly these days, is it’s cluttered ... . I think that’s going to be the next challenge for young people coming along is how to get rid of all the verbal and video weeds, so that the story is clear and moving and provocative ... . All of that part of journalism is research. Then, you’ve got to put that down and say “Now, how do I best tell this story?”

Q: The question that goes around every body even tangentially related to the business is how are we going to start paying for this stuff? Newspapers are going down, TV network ratings are going down. All the traditional media, people aren’t doing, and the ones that are popping up, people really haven’t found a way to pay for. Do you have any ideas about how that’s going to happen?

A: If I did, I would be president of the world. I’ve talked to some people about it who I think are on the right track. First of all, we’re at a tipping point. New media has survived, because they’ve been sucking off old media. The New York Times does something, and everybody talks about it, and that’s how they can do their blogs and all that stuff. And that’s about to go away, because the New York Times is only around because it’s selling off its real estate. So, they’re not making a profit. And when the New York times is in trouble, how about the rest of us? ... . The myth is out there, that everything’s for free, and eventually we’re all going to be working at Starbucks. And the only thing left of what we think of as journalism is going to be opinion and YouTube ... . The Associated Press, and some others, have started coming up with an extension of the copyright law, using the computerized world that we have. So that, if you’re a blogger, and you want to use the New York Times article, and you want to comment and quote from it, they have ways of figuring out that you’ve done that, and you’ve got to pay them three cents. It’s not going to be huge, because they don’t want people not to use it, they just want to get a trillion revenue streams ... . You could do government [funding], but then you’ve got government’s finger in it, that says, well after a while, you’re getting our money, just do what we want to do. So, if you want to keep it in the free enterprise system, it seems to me that you’ve got to figure out a way to get small revenue streams coming back, so that you can keep journalism from becoming just opinion and YouTube.