(NBC News correspondent Bob Dotson spent the week of Aug. 26 as a visiting faculty at Poynter. He sent the following to the listserv set up for seminar participants. It is re-published here with his permission.)
By Bob Dotson
In the past 10 days, I've produced nearly an hour's worth of stories. All tape. All enterprise. My beat has been hope in all its many forms. I spent the first few hours wandering on foot with families passing out 8-by-10 photos of their loved ones, trudging to 21 hospitals in New York City, standing in line to be told all of the injured were simply, "John or Jane Doe." Their wallets and purses were lost in the fall. Their injuries severe.
I've been on or near that terrible pile at ground zero every morning, but one, the day I pitched an idea I got off a Poynter listserv and went to Lenox Hill Hospital's maternity ward. The hospital is experiencing a mini-baby boom -- mothers who couldn't reach their own doctors wander in off the street. We even taped a birth from beginnning to end. The mother, who would have been inside the World Trade Center, had she not gone into labor, held her new born to her chest and murmured, "You are the future of New York City."
We did a story that should air this morning that puts a face on the faceless thousands who have pitched in with the rescue efforts. He is a volunteer emergency medical technician from Scarsdale, N.Y. He is also an NBC News producer, one of the first on the scene. Eric Ortner left his camera crew behind and spent the next 48 hours looking for lost lives. He delayed his own coverage two days--the biggest story of his young life. Eric is just 26. He began volunteering at his local ambulance corps at 16; took night classes in medicine while working toward a journalism degree at the University of Rochester. When his buddies went out each evening and did what college students do, Eric completed an 800-hour course to become an EMT crew chief.
And when our worst nightmare happened, Eric Ortner was there for us. He took no camera. No notebook. He conducted himself with a doctor's sensitivity. He would not tell us what a dying cop he was trying to save told him. Eric said simply, "He thought I was a doctor. It wouldn't be right."
Ortner did take a camera with him toward the end of the week and got the first close-up, ground level shots NBC aired, but there were no more injured he needed to save.
I suspect there will be a spirited Poynter discussion about that.
It will offer me a bit of diversion to read it, as I plunge on at ground zero.
Thoughts and love to all of you.
