An hour with NBC Newsman Bob Dotson

from would rather auditorium at the university of kansas k pr presents an hour with bob dotson i'm kate mcintyre bob datsun is a correspondent with nbc he's best known for american story with bob dobson which appears on nbc's today show he's received over one hundred awards for his work including eight emmy awards a record setting five edward r morrow awards and the journalism award that brought him to the university of kansas the william allen white national citation this was a return home of sorts for jobs and not only is he a university of kansas graduate well he was actually you know he worked part time for katie and you the flagship station of kansas public radio later this hour we'll hear about his time aka ian you when he stopped by the akp our studios to talk to k pr news director jay shafer we'll also marked the seventy fifth anniversary of the book i married

adventure the story of sydney native explore oh said johnson but first here's bob johnson giving the keynote address at william allen white day sponsored by the university of kansas school of journalism and mass communication april twenty third two thousand fifteen all my suit and it's from my grandfather he graduated from the law school here in nineteen ten at the time he was the only person in our family for over a century who went to college my grandfather used to drag me down to the front of the law school before football games because i spent summers in hiawatha kansas and the rest of my life i grew up in a big city of st louis

answer yes sir that's apples in the grainy was a person in a law school i know and the border was a statue oh annie i go to school here my grandmother was a little nonplussed when i moved into journalism however she thought i was going to be a lawyer like my grandpa parties here to study pre war and then i found it you know it all changed it wasn't until years later when i actually got on a network program that she could see what i did for a living and i had a speech that was on the today show and of course i was so thrilled i called her i want that as a gravel did you see that story of course would have a long pause yelena trade during the area pay you for two miners working day you will start again

and she'll have to be ninety four and it was on a running joke for years ago or on fridays so both of them i wish they'd into probably are watching me today because when enrollment team called me last year and said that they voted me this honor i thought he was calling because i have written books become completely floored and i remembered that my grandmother said i probably wouldn't hold his job and yet here i am in my fortieth year with nbc news at sixty eight and they've taken me from a redheaded freckle faced kid gray four million miles in this country crisscrossing back

and forth on a simple idea maybe that big media mirror that reflects power and celebrity have someone standing behind and who is important i just got back out a month overseas talking to people about the american story and i was really floored once again that anybody cared overseas until a professor from berlin wrote me and he said did you know the united states was settled by a hundred and ninety eight different nationalities another maybe doesn't know how to ninety eight and he said they came to the shores either as immigrants are slaves and they fought five hundred and sixty two native tribes as will know it was a messy messy history what they created the united states of america they created opportunity and

by the way you know that on any given tuesday you can probably put on the dunkin donuts not get firebombed he says you have had a unique career in that pew study the quiet americans who make that happen not necessarily power or celebrity not certainly our politics which prefers gridlock to compromise and every day are journalists talk about the fading the middle class and all of the problems that we have it would be like if all of us were journalists in a car on the right front tire went flat we beat each other to our iphones to tweak the fact that the right front tire was flat and maybe six weeks later we come back and lament the fact the right front tire is still flat but meanwhile over in the shadows some quiet american has figured out how to solve a problem i hit upon aside a big old religious figure the day i did you know that they figured out how to put toilets in houses fifteen hundred

years before jesus was born on the isle of crete a bunch of ordinary folks who probably or plumbers figured out how to put a toilet the house right it only ones who picked up on it at the time of the romans and the romans had indoor plumbing but then a bunch of little boys came down from the middle east one day and sacked rome and we forgot to ask the people it puts lots of houses and the next time they put it put the house was eighteen twenty nine almost three thousand years before well that struck an idea in my head that may be more time talking to our aunts and uncles and sisters brothers and sisters and less time chasing him protection because maybe these other people have an idea names we don't know which should know

or why our country not only survived that thrives or my daughter and her husband and our grandkids live in brooklyn there's a bus and that the sixty eight lynette goes on fourth coney island unit passes a mcdonald's which is owned by a palestinian and the general manager keeps kosher because in his even hasidic jew most of the clientele are first generation immigrants from pakistan and india and the ukraine and russia back home some other relatives are at each other's throats in brooklyn are on each other soccer games so what that professor in berlin asked me actually start drilling through maybe a study of seemingly ordinary people this why this country moves forward and they might have already sold things like what people expect in houses but because we got several generations now where we don't have active journalism asking the

seemingly ordinary people what blueprint have you found to get beyond the well documented challenges and shortcomings of our country on a day to day basis one of them that i met very early age was a janitor in a railroad station just over the kansas line and he told me one day sitting in a coffee shop about a fellow named paul sykes who lined up with six hundred ex slaves on the oklahoma line waiting for a free land in oklahoma he got as far as el reno oklahoma and he was joined by hundreds of nationalities and native americans who are trying to find some piece of the american dream but it was too late to plan jim caldwell analyst argus because the opening until april so he said this man named paul sykes went down the rock island railroad station because there were seven trains coming south of wichita and seven trains come north

from dallas every day and he started to sing us moving in the only option right along and people on the train laughter like educational instruction quarters and nickels dimes what have you and he took that money he bought food any set out to cook dinner for everybody not just the six hundred x life that everybody was waiting for better times you did that for twenty seven years he was so caught up and they're getting everyone out trying to find is all the sublime your mentality in the story try to face look like the western edge of montana and a voice like a bugle and you obviously told the story many times in the coffee shop and no one's paying any attention to accept me and he said you know i was an illegal immigrant two time british from wales and i jump ship in galveston and ended up in oklahoma and i got a job as a janitor in life is really

good here comes the first world war i decided well i owed something to america so i enlisted in the whole rainbow division i went over to france i was wounded and i was on a troop train kind of actual harm and i was ready to come home and my bunk mate was a french officer and he said where you're from inside america your accent and south america uses r i ever buy american accent these were a part of american history though reno oklahoma and subtraction as i've got real big like ah about that is he still sing and dance on the rules platform ephron and so sidney zion church that on his doors of my eyes get big and i said yeah how you know why he said well when i was a little boy and my dad was an international sales and one summer it took me all around america and the thing i remember the most is

that old man in a long black coat and the derby hat singing we all are waiting for better times i decided that even the kinds of stories that were most under reported an american stories about us now that said people who don't necessarily run for president not to write a book don't we are too busy solving problems most of what i've done on television is a little like tossing darts into small units in drifts away but the blueprints that i found from these individuals like for instance our most recent national park looking for a national park was developed by a guy who was very nature photographer and he found us that's the historians will look for over two hundred years for instance he said in our first truly democratic election was our most of our

expedition how that visibly in all this nineteen year old mother with a baby on her back let all these guys were like navy seals over the top of the rocky mountains and down the coast that they got on the columbia river he says i started the wonders of the biggest reason they're making like thirty miles a day and i got about where portland is it took them six weeks ago across the river from the washington state side of the oregon side is a sorcerer reading more in depth research out they got there just before the russians overstepped the russians have gotten there the russians a bottle of food from local indians and so the most important sort of recovering from it is that we got over there were going to see it across the room and they tried they have today in a city near venues so they decided now's a foreign national park to let everybody have a boat loads of arc had one black eye on on that trip with a slave still invoke his effort that by marvel info and aleppo

province nieces was i didn't tell us the first time but there was an election including everybody around and now the coast guard says there are ships out there because where the columbia river goes in the pacific ocean in fact other posters around the world two big states undertook their ships out there for training but they finally got the other side and he got the national park because he kept bringing up all the stuff of it forget about rosa parks actually saw the pacific and they made that are the national park because all the historians of the wrong for two hundred years and he was the son of a mother father of waters and so he would look at all the title track titan charts and all that and figured out what they saw his friends called an email and said you know he's not even invited for the unveiling president's going to be there the governor is going to be their coca cola's none of their money is there of power and money in all there so i called him and he said well i thought as i

if i were coming to standup next to the president this never would've happened nothing gets done right size and leisure time our money they said i have no power and no money all i have is the fact that i did it but i stand up next to the guys who really you guys get your picture on the today show and the front page of our newspaper then i would be a symbol of their ally they didn't do anything except show up with elected officials and do it so they will back away he says i decided to to attack this problem is i would give our teaching my young daughter rebecca how to ride a bike once i got the training wheels on and she starts wobbling offer cross the church parking lot the training wheels power and money i would never think of doing alongside yelling to the neighbors may look good bad daddy daughter back out and ride the bike because of course rebecca would never ride the bike again he says the way to get power and money attached to your idea or project

is to stand in the shadows and applaud so there is a terrific story on the surface our most recent national park in the sky but i included in the story the blueprint because you could take that to the kiwanis club you could take that to the pta you could take that to the condo meetings and what a seemingly ordinary person had figured out about how to get things done becomes very very important so i found a few things when i was writing this most recent book you know they said we can just order a war stories because only five people read it know i read it to see if their names and once i realized i didn't mention in that operating only my so they said what have you learned solid doctrine and what have you learned from all of this for forty years not much of that new designers i can't remember anything but the more i thought about it despite our headlines americans who

thrive and their communities to thrive embrace differences but there was a scale but nobody had braces differences ferguson you get this you get that absolute that all that but then we've also got a guy who was an illegal immigrant who's now one of the foremost cancer researchers in the world at johns hopkins and he has invited people from all over america from totally different backgrounds who were brilliant bartoli different to be on his committee because he says if everybody came from lawrence kansas you get stuck because when you run into a problem but if you bring people who were brilliant but from lots of different backgrounds to attack a problem with it it's all and you look back at american history over over again sure they're under ferguson's there's the civil wars there is he's calling well documented and and terrible things that happen but they're also people who figured out how to embrace differences differences they've come to a better idea of how to solve a problem secondly i think within reason america works

is that were pioneers who was a more pioneers think oh the was it were brought here in slavery decided on that state alabama an oklahoma kansas on friday and pioneers are that is their willingness to explore despite all the challenges people come to america immigrants come to america not because they think the world is painted with gold bricks here in america that was another generation they come with their eyes open but they also know that they have opportunities if they explore and americans who embrace differences say i don't really care if you get on the wagon with me blue organ trio's long as you don't change it will but they would not get there and time again that's what happens they also value timor i went out to a place called thoughts for montana recently because somebody said they put on three operatives a year that they write themselves

and on nine other people on the staff idle research i realized that there were twenty nine those towns around fort are up this beautiful part of mountains about twenty years south eleanor in his drive to middle aged turn right so i thought ok how can a town with nine hundred people have three original operas year have figured out how to keep their hospital open by opening up the swap shop and so if you have a sure you want a little bit more to sell and normally would owe fifty cents a cellar for like twenty dollars everyone is willing to pay twenty bucks because the nineteen fifty goes to the hospital so now they have doctors in the hospital then they opened up the schools and rather than have your kids go two hundred miles a day round trip or go to boarding school they opened up the schools and that was a great thing for the superintendent because he was offered a big job in helena and decided well maybe i really

love this little town ms altieri my eyes filled with ideas is the first place to everyone and also montana to the silver mines and fought for and won the silver mines disappeared and boom to bust and they stuck around to figure out ways to make a living even own it there's nobody there but a lot of money it prevents schools and other brain tumor and forty two and he tells a tale you said i was out fishing before going to drive to the hospital and i was worried that we didn't have enough insurance i came downtown application the big ten have been put out over main street and all my neighbors were they're an enemy of forty thousand dollar check but i've taken a job nine years later insists his daughter sidney comes down with cancer and these nine hundred people that again they came up this is a great recession recently

with a hundred thousand dollars but of course when i asked them that why how you do it is that well you know we just good neighbors not yet ready for a hundred grand forty grand and one follows a rancher something you said this is the last best place he has to survive and he says we didn't do it for the superintendent of the family dinner for us we didn't save us there would be no doubt as of a honeydew what amanda blueprints know the economy now is a voluntary some voices are mr kedl showed the other day for fourteen thousand dollars and i used every year and i knew one of my neighbors meeting to cattle shoot and i said i'll salty a three point five and i'll take the fourteen thousand that actually lessen that this is a year old and everything else will go towards making sure that little girl lives and so everybody kind of them down but they got something out of it human nature so that they get it done you said you know uganda this town now

and you're thrilled because it's beautiful which outlawed tourist from a summertime architecture's wonderful we painted all up but he says that's not the town the town for the people that's why we're not a ghost town still in the twenty first century america still has its pioneers americans keep their promises successful ordinary seemingly quiet americans keep their promises as a little company just outside of boston it's the oldest american company it dates back to thirteenth twenty six it started in turkey and the family is a family owned business made gongs and finally on about eleven or twelve generation to get sick were the gongs and this guy came to united states more to work in a chocolate factory that the family got to and said alright ok i'll open up a song factory in nine states three weeks

later the great depression started and avoid laying off everybody has tripled in size you look around boston you'll find the best workers from his assembly line he said i'll give you a promise you take care of my family i'll take care of yours and so he opened his ocean fong factory in nineteen twenty nine and they have never had a layoff bobbie dooley he said well okay what books if you don't mind we have automation or changes being retrained i always have room for a human brain it helps solve another problem in my company so as long as you can be retrained and are willing to do it and work many hours we need to get done that before yeah i'm on ashley ford is never worked harder or faster or produce more i want to produce it right the first time as he says the average american product is shipped out and write only seventy five percent of the time

and i wanna be right ninety eight percent of the time and they started talking to people who actually might use a bomb and that included a lot of jazz musicians that no one's talking to because you almost invisible the nineteen twenty nine to the larger society he says how can i help you and i said well you know that they had already put together and call a high hat that might work well and that all the symbols that we use today the beatles started using silk in all the big bands started using children's jazz musicians classical musicians and then he started asking technology people say listen what we were all assembled in a room and turned a button and that we would hear what it sounds like in hollywood bowl and turn it again and that would put a sign like ramadi and after jail so you know exactly what you're going to get before you get it and then everybody on the assembly line has to sign off on everything individually before they move on down the line i met a guy named george clack as an immigrant from greece who started out

polling gongs from one side of the assembly line to the other and waiting he has been retrained at times he is seventy two years old and is now part of quality control listening to what about the cymbals sound like he has two daughters who are both in medical school and he's had a middle class income all these years they are debt free seventy five people on the assembly line another twenty five people who sell it and they have ninety two percent of the world market they had never outsourced anything they haven't laid off anybody since nineteen twenty nine i mean really how did they do it what and so you know i was talking to people from the bottom up so as to the top of the people who thought the first time it ever had to win a major i'm an average ceo a credible one and i said well we got a family tradition since thirty twenty six you never hire the spouse no spouses in his business and if you are a

granddaughter grandson you must go to college you must graduate from college and then you have to go out and find your own job on any kind of operation has nothing to do with music or symbols and you must be successful in a job for five years and then you think on top of the rest of them about the job until the last piece but i learned i learned from the backyard a writer kay you what my grandfather was too old and a graduate right imagine and my grandmother was my dad took me out to have coffee in the morning of the graduation ceremony and he mentioned that he did not go to college and i saw that and he said you know i never got past the fifth grade you got a company dotson optical company that in our masters about five things on the wall he said i want twenty six years the night from college

he said my father left when i was tan join the army and never came back leaving my mother with three kids raised know extended family detritus and he says it was an unusual at the old son out to a former mansion and it became an indentured servant and whatever money they made it came back to modern reveries of the other teams and he says i was over here on my head shoulder up with my uncle who was a cop and a government a farmer and threw me in the back of a wagon and took me back to st louis and all the way back to the farmers against letters we sent you were taking dollar bills but we've got a job for you there's a wooden platter and they need somebody's small degenerate not up underneath the assembly line and sweep up the wood shavings and all the people working on the assembly line were first generation immigrants none of them spoke english so they're all adults either speaking italian and german

and then i went to become a janitor in an optical store and the man who owned the apple store's of the law never asked you to work tonight you might want to consider going to school twenty six years later become from janitor to manager of two of the topical stories and then i was born his second son and he forgot that makes up on myself which appears hundred and forty dollars savings and nineteen forty six annie read that there was a grinding song for sale in kansas city yet not money for the train ticket to kansas city he was to probably talk to the relatives inside it's been a nicely kept grinding stone kept on his laptop on the train came back and started arts an optical with a partner that christmas to partner went to mexico with all the money it gets at the party would you do i start again in

october you got polio and you couldn't walk and even which revealed on until you're eight years old and you were too at the time when i started to get well so when you don't ask people in the backyard you know it's i think the real story of america it's not the absence of challenge it's not all our shortcomings although what we do is travel is journalist and herds and pounce on problems to repeat over and over and over again without a glimmer of solution because they're not asking people who might have a solution but the coal mine is the reason i became a storyteller because after dinner in hiawatha kansas we go out on the front porch and rock and most older people will tell you it's not what know what detail and then i'd go on the army and i was a

protocol honest woman choose my grandfather would say things like i'm a really bad at it about my honeymoon know the salt lake city and at the helm to go to school because i had a free ticket i've done some work for the pacific and so i was on the train and he said we were in a cafe or your ground on i am the conductor came up doing annie syria although it somehow other cancers and it was rather the one you haven't seen in twenty years my grandfather was the last of ten gets so you must've been like a tiny baby when all these people went west to find their fortune turns out this guy had gone the minnesota and try to get a job on the railroad and course to the primary ethnic group

in minnesota was norwegian a swedish which it has never been into bailey's they got a job and his job was as a conductor on the union pacific my grandfather had a penny postcards but he showed me this was sent back to the mall and while it is like the perfect twinkie it showed my grandmother and grandfather floating on their backs in the great salt lake in it with a little spaghetti straps swimsuits and had similar with the brothers bobby taken a couple days off of the railroad big red circle around the brother the postcards address to the mother i imagine you get the more we found bratz it's b well my career is the more later i'm convinced that

that's why i've spent my entire career looking in an address list of long forgotten names and trying to spend some time with them not just to get their stories not to do good news i'm not sure if all i could care less about faith based on him is i wanna do an investigative report on a seemingly ordinary person because they might have some crops and solutions that will handle problems of it face today that it might've been up with a toilet that the house and so i've spent my entire career doing just one thing the shortest distance between two people is a good story what you know my story and i know you're as i know not only how we differ and i start to understand how they were alive and despite what i'm more wisdom doesn't always wear a suit you've just heard and these

fees bob duff and giving the keynote address at william allen white day on april twenty third two thousand fifteen that's in his best known for american story with bob dives in which appears on nbc's today show he's received over one hundred awards for his work including eight emmy awards a record setting five edward r morrow awards and that two thousand fifteen william allen white national citation previous winners of the citation include npr political analyst cokie roberts sportswriter frank to ford and cnn's candy crowley you're listening to k pr presents on kansas public radio lawrence is a familiar place for the veteran journalist danson graduated from the university of kansas in nineteen sixty eight with degrees in journalism and political science while he was actually you he worked part time for katie and you the flagship station of kansas public

radio while he was in town for william allen white day he stopped by the k pr studios to talk with news director jay shafer you've received hundreds of awards for your work rather than your body's i'm old yes particularly you're writing in broadcast news from an east edward r murrow award is anything special about getting the william allen white award from k u law school were you first began learning about earl lloyd made probably the highly prized were never gotten is this particular war because it comes from home my grandfather graduated from k u in nineteen ten and i came here to be a lawyer like he was because you dreaded law school and i got hooked on broadcasting so i worked here it in those days it was called k n u and the rest is history i just kind of backed into it but it seemed like a whole lot more fun than preparing a legal brief so in a way this radio station is at least partly responsible for

your tremendous success in broadcasting who are not available to aig we used to follow you know on track and field on saturday which we broadcast out of the station with a fifteen minute newscast which was mostly just ripped off the wire and read quickly and i got a little the first one i ever did and it was some prime minister of some small country that never heard of in africa who was assassinated and i looked at his name i knew of his narrative it will pronounce it so i said i'm sorry for his name is being withheld pending notification of next you improvise that's right and had also on saturday nights here they had what they call portals of prayer which ended the broadcast it and they kept it in longer and longer and longer they sometime and forty five minutes and we were only paid the ten o'clock we all had dates eternal three freight so there were wasn't me thank goodness cause i wouldn't fire but one of the guys it was working here that night

he went ahead and shoot up the record to the amen uses now we take the importance of prayer was supposed to go forty minutes all was all he had to get out to help program director actually was she was listening and so she said you know i like you honey but you got we did lose as you did the people you worked with like oh my gosh when price was the unit chief announcer our edwin brown was the general manager the program director was a lady named mildred scene and get right with a degree yeah he was the music director and he brought us into the twentieth century shortly before the twenty first century by saying immigrant drivers jammed stuff as well as a classical music so he ended up with a jazz show that's right the jazz scene with the great well it's been said that good broadcast journalism is the art of storytelling using words images and sound to relay information what are some of the secrets to telling a good story or being a good storyteller i think the most

important thing to remember when you tell a story is you have to hook it almost immediately to your listener or e reader and most people think well i've got to do this story it's wonderful if you don't understand the stories because yuri is not educated enough in this material is not my fault because i won a research there's a great story behind understand but what i do is i start every story that i think i might tell with the assumption that nobody cares about at all including myself which forces me to focus and try to find the building blocks of the story the craft is so that i can cook the largest number of audience quickly because the story might be about a derailment in dubai but it's really interesting you hear in large because of this distance and this and then i go out and find a strong central character they helped get into that story because people have a difficult time relating to topics but ever better time relating to somebody is interesting and so a lot of time to find the right

kind of interesting character to get into the story people be already halfway through before they really don't care about the story and then they know the context because it had been brought into that by the person that they thought was intriguing and by the tiny about the other hand you've got a story of what happens when you can't find that interesting person on which you can build your story is surely that's happened only get fired at that that that is good looking you're looking at the right person the right well we at it and not everything works all time i think i've survived for forty years at nbc because a small victories you know today i actually pull a battery in my tape recorder so it actually turned on you know things like that but i think the definition of a storyteller is someone who's curious and the best color storyteller doesn't just show or tell but that helps the fewer the listener that figure out how to experience what you just saw or heard and if you're

curious which are doing is you're walkin on the street and you're looking at people going past you and some people seem to be more of a character than others right and so you to stop the one that you see accountable but makes a harem of it you're neck stand up saying here she is intriguing and they're a hero location where they're putting in the stinky sewer and rather than just have a soundbite from the mayor's and we're going to bookstores now in jail or you know you've got some woman who's been living next to that sewer for the last twenty years are having to teach class next to it and she's already kind of engaging and you just start talking to her and i found that the best kind of the storytelling comes out of the non question you know professionals like you and like me will work greenwood answer questions but most people answer questions in three parts they give you the answer you think that they'd be they think you've asked them explain their answer if you wait just a beat they feel a little awkwardness if you don't understand their answers so they go obama that's what you're alive and so you get to the heart of it but more importantly it is just

an ordinary person like somewhat a wandering down the street next to solar you don't walk up to a missouri hi i'm bob johnson from nbc news you might know me this is my camera is as a light summer put up a number of microphone and studies say yeah boy a stinky in that and usually have produced it have lived here for thirty five years has been staging you get a sound that sometimes is just making a statement not actually asking the true question that's correct what i'm sure after all these years in the business it's hard to choose a favorite story but can you at least tell us about one of your favorite stories well i usually say my favorite story is the next one knows why been around for forty years but i was just thinking today about a guy whose names for benson and i went out to do a story on a little island called block island which is off the coast of rhode island based on a little clip of them in the associated press because it was funny he was ninety years old at the time and if you were sixteen years

old and wanting to get a driver's license on block island had a go for it and so i thought their beaches got a funny in a park over here you know but the more we got to know about fred we found out that he was an orphan who came to block island at eight years old and never left he was taken in by a family at and on saturday nights all the farm families will have parties and i would brag on their kids and the guy who took him fred burton milligan got up and point a best all of his kids and said you keep an eye on fred benson you see what he did fred became the police chief the fire chief that have a rescue squad head of the chamber commerce they started a baseball league soccer league when he was in his fifties and they repented the island is changing from farms to tourism he figured well they we don't need hotels so i went to college he got a dream came back and talk shop and he ended up teaching all three of the

major contractors who are there and i find out from the granddaughter of third victim that fred still lived in the same room in their house then he moved into and eighty eight for eighty two years and the room is undefeated and i said you're caressing the condo where small town decides he has plenty of money and i said really she said yes he won the rhode island state lottery a few years back and it was five million dollars so he threw himself a birthday party invited every family on the island a common announced any kids want to go to college he would send them and he set up a bank account for that purpose we shot the story of pitchers start off to be just a funny little ha ha and were waiting for the ferry to come to take us back and friends with us and he's looking at this lighthouse and he looked at me he says i hope mr mollica knows how it turned out great story and a story that turned into something far different than what you thought it was

going to really happens all time and it's because of that non question you know you just you know say hey fred listeners are more of a story or that i know you just get to talk and and and people open up it's the same thing like if you're an adult airline flight going back to grandma's house and you're somewhat halfway interested in it i said next year in the center seat he tell you about how they stabbed her daughter in us stock was really you know that things that you would never tell anybody else until a stranger if you're halfway interested in georgia's you jump into another question you must sit next to some interesting things well let's move on to another question here we know that the newspaper industry has been struggling network tv news is struggling to someone we also know that young people and many other internet users don't want to pay for news these are all things we've we've learned over the last twenty five years or so what's going to happen to the future of the news business and people like you and i do you know i grew up reading newspapers watching lightly and news on the on the network television where

i'm more optimistic than i've been in the last ten years and the reason for it is is this i worked for nbc for forty years and i believe at the last five i've had a job you know i'm sixty five because of the internet i mean the today show gets about forty six million people a morning watching my american stories afterwards ago on electronic shelf and over a period of about five to six months worldwide some of those stories got twenty million views and it's not just a click on the internet they're fresh where to sit through a fifteen second commercial to watch it so what i thought would be the boogeyman until our jobs is actually get me a reason to be able to go back to the bean counters and say i know it's dimes as opposed to dollars but twenty million times and bad and so maybe we could have the production to do you know the kind of story that you and i would like to do as in depth so you know people who are paying paycheck say their main job now is to make sure they have some revenue in it it's harder harder to find revenue as you can just argue quality

but the one thing that people still craved and they always have this context and and more social media just falls from headline the headline the headline on some blowup in five people are dead and then tomorrow is another thing happen in that there's not enough context well if you could suddenly get a little bit more protection money to add that context into its people understand and you hopefully tell if an engaging way so that you have a larger audience and you'd think you could get and i think they saw some hope for the future there's no doubt is changing i mean unlike the music business they used to make the mice on records but somebody buys one record one download and it gives it a hundred friends so you're going broke but meanwhile that's why the tickets to the live concerts cost two hundred dollars a seat because that's the one thing they can't you know pass around so i was talking to somebody on a room five of them or the drummers he said you know the beatles made all their money years ago on records we make it alive tonight so

we consider a record just of the commercials for us soldier radio broadcasting television know that everything has to pay its own way or have to find a different history and two but i think that there's still a desire for what we do and and i think it's also wonderful if not everybody's doing it anymore because and pink things standup you look on npr that the cereal just won a pulitzer prize or peabody award for the major awards and it's basically the news stories that you had to download and a podcast that this presented in such a way it is like a great radio serial even though they're written stories about real people is it is doled out in such a way that you know and charles dickens be proud because you wanna find out a little doll is actually getting out of prison so i don't think the that the desire is changed it come because the fact that not many people are doing it if you're interested in trying to still do it you can figure out a way to do it but i do think the young generation coming on should take some marketing courses

because even if you're working for just one company in years past you got all the money you needed to do it you need to do from one entity like the today show and now you know i'd tweak my blog and i make sure that part of my stuff gets on cnbc in some on msnbc and someone one stories kerry's if you even know about but comcast provides so as i parse it all out and every one of those play says give me a penny or two and so that i end up getting the same protection money to be able to go to alaska for one go but right as market and you can just go and so on to do it because it's the right thing to do to do a great story you could do that thirty years ago because all these outlets have mobilized to make money they already have public airwaves so their church was news they give back a little bit but now they're in competition with every you know cap and download in the world so they have to make money in order to make money you have to figure out a market what advice do you have for the next generation of bob thought something and what wisdom can you impart

to journalist or aspiring journalists the golden age of any job is two weeks before you joined don't get depressed when i graduated from k u it was the depths of the vietnam war i sent out five hundred resumes and there are only five hundred and twenty television stations in the country at the time and i have three replies to have said no way and the third was the nbc station local the city which is the only other job i had before what the network my grandmother who lived in hiawatha kansas when eichler up when she could finally see what it did for a living covered up on the network she was still convinced that i should have been a lawyer what would crumble i said well did you see that story on the today show years well what to think long thoughts your limit trade they're not going to keep then you for doolin his work a day

you will spare of the day and became a running joke about koran friday's instagram or a check for them again so i mean the young generation coming up that eight eighth people my age and even younger than me you know there was that look out over the landscape in the syrian authorities are gone and no way is that work for you and it does seem tough but on the other hand that's an opportunity for you to create a business model not just an opportunity to do that the lovely stuff you like to do on regular tv or on the internet but a way to pay for them when she figured out a duet sky's the limit because not many other people doing that they're just they're on satisfying themselves by just doing the status quo and that works for only so long before you get fired i was talking to young journalist today she said we don't have to actually tell stories anymore because we tweet it really it was a lesson you tweeted she said the suspect went into the mall and bought a green sweater

and i said how about this a number of letters honey the gutter and a step up from you know which was the beginning of a story in which is something that people just pass over if you wanna get paid on friday you can't tell me the country western nurses and japanese poets have been writing a twitter like for centuries and they've been writing lines that stick like would jesus were a rolex on his tv show i mean these are great twitter feeds so if you want to be a professional just because the format has changed doesn't mean that you know no longer have to tell stories the beauty of it is even if you've only got a little bit of talent there is a craft to it and if you'll learn the craft you can be better in all those people who write books never get him out of the closet about some thanks for being here with us today or congratulations on getting the william allen white award that's nbc newsman bob thompson visiting with k pr news director

j schafer on april twenty third two thousand fifteen i'm kate mcintyre you're listening to k pr presents on kansas public radio this week marks the seventy fifth anniversary of a story of adventure and exploration beginning ensure new kansas i married adventure is the autobiography of oh so johnson the book tells the story of a search and her husband martin johnson and their adventures filming wildlife around the world i married adventure was published in may nineteen forty and became a bestselling nonfiction book of the year kelly ann wright is the author of oath that and martin for the love of adventure which tells the story of the johnsons and wright's book was named a kansas notable book in two thousand twelve from akp our prisons archives here's kelly and write a semi done similar to the young can sense that at the leno says only

sixteen ran away and got married and she followed martin on his adventures that i don't mean it in a way that she followed him she was an adventure to but because she married him and she was able to travel the world in a way that women at the time really weren't evil to them and they made a documentary film it's endless heard several books and they both wrote magazine articles and books and asserts and children's books as well but tell about their travels in borneo and in africa knows that their interactions with native people and with weapons how did you first become aware of their story or how did you become interested in the johnsons i was in graduate school studying american history and was looking for a topic that would take me into some narratives of adventure and a of wilderness is that were not americans was looking at travelers went to africa and two entities and south america and my advisor at the time told me

about the secret strike but she had seen in the window of an antique store in new york city and she actually had purchased long that i went on my own and that was of course poses i married adventure and when i began reading it i was truly fascinated by what i was i had to say about these wild places that was very different from what the men were saying the other people's research and end also very charming were the things that endeared her to me was her love of oddities bringing given dates back to new york city and keeping him as a pad and green escape that was from an borneo to africa as well on safari and tying intellectual a refrigerator to her houseboat in borneo to strange fascinating things that really meant at the time weren't doing to joe trying to make the process of traveling a more domestic she really saw herself as making a home with

martin indyk circumstances under which a lot of us would just drop or hands of the way she loves adventure and she loves the outdoors as he always has this yearning in her writings and even so her personal letters that she wrote home to her mother for a home for a satellite for a white picket fence he puts it have one point that i don't i don't i don't know personally i don't think she would have been happy that her life had been so in in africa she's really able at like paradise with it that for four years she's able to actually make a homeric that it's a strange sort of a mixture of american culture and african wilderness or shoes grow watermelons and levis that the elephants are coming into her garden to eat tell you know your research for this but what's the most surprising thing you learned about a son martin unions are what let me rephrase that what do you like the most about them one of the things that

endeared me to marinos says that they themselves are constantly learning readjusting their preconceptions and seeing things anew they weren't afraid to admit mistakes or to reveal their enthusiasm it's not give you an example from my book that expresses what i mean by that practice that first morning three elegant still plays ali within sight rolling dust over their backs and just enjoying the sun and enter the johnsons delighted in their casual errors like this place as their home martin said amazed and they've let us move right and they walked that the labor market set up his camera he was getting wonderful footage of elephants mingling peacefully when he told us had to walk into the picture as she got nearer she began to think of the wild elephants a circus animals and imagines it safe to in her words going up and feed them unpack their wrinkle

trunks to walk towards them seem the most natural thing in the world to do it but decided that the quantum amos jumbo it hadn't occurred to me to be afraid but when she got too close to the animals she startled time she froze for a second stunned at the wheeling alabama to now seemed more wild than a circus act they began to run away but i was so instead of doing the same herself started to chase after them it was a ludicrous i remembered martin that tiny khaki clad figure in pursuit of those great hall it's also heard this historic laughter and turned back what would you have done if you caught them he teased her gathering up what remained of her dignity and feeling quite silly she replied i had to show them they could have left me that's kelly and write reading from her book o sound and martin for the love of adventure this month marks seventy

five years since the publication of us the johnson's autobiography i married adventure find out more at the us search and martin johnson safari museum and senate their website is so far a museum dot org i'm kay mcintyre k pr present is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas