Dateline NBC - Talking Dateline: Dateline Confidential

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

At our in-person Dateline Live event in Nashville last fall, Lester Holt, Blayne Alexander, Andrea Canning, Josh Mankiewicz, Keith Morrison, and Dennis Murphy took the stage for a Q&A hosted by actress and avid Dateline viewer Holly Robinson Peete. Joined by A Date With Dateline podcast hosts Kimberly Arnold and Katie Mitchell, the discussion focused on how Dateline stories are developed, how correspondents prepare for interviews, and what happens behind the scenes. Take a listen to learn which correspondent Josh would call from jail, what Lester never travels without, and why Keith’s voice is exactly the same in real life as it is on the show. Still have questions? DM us a video on social @DatelineNBC or leave a voicemail at [phone]. Your question may be featured in an upcoming episode. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey, it's Josh Mankewitz, and today we have a special edition of Talking Dayline. Instead of talking about a particular episode, we're going to share a discussion from the second session of Dateline Live. That was our in-person event held in the fall at the Pinnacle in Nashville. The entire Dateline team was on the interview hot seat, listening to questions from our host, actress and avid Dateline viewer, Holly Robinson-Pete. And also from our friends, the proud Dateline superfans, the hosts of the award-winning podcast, A Date with Dateline, Kimberly Arnold and Katie Mitchell. They did not shy away from asking the hard-hitting questions. We called the segment Dateline Confidential. Here's Holly Robinson Pete to start us off.

Let's get this night started. If you've ever wondered how a Dateline episode comes together, you're a moment. about to find out. Like any good journalists, we're going to go straight to the source, and that would be our friend, anchor Lester Holt, of course, and the best team of correspondence in the business. Give it up for Josh Mankowitz, Keith Morrison, Andrea Kinney, Lane Alexander, and Janice Murphy. So let's pull the curtain back a little bit on this. Number one, how do you find your stories, Lester? What is the origin

of getting those stories and starting that process? Well, from my standpoint, a lot of times it's in the doorway of my office. A producer will come by and say, I heard about this story. We start talking through how we could develop it and to really create the storylines that we need for this program. And so they're very simple conversations. Those are the best kind. Organic

conversations, you know, conversations. I heard this or someone told me this, and then you take it from there. We have such a Such a great team of people who think. Everybody is looking for stories all the time. Everybody's collegial until a story hits in the Caribbean or Hawaii. That's right. Oh, then it has to be Josh or eight.

Josh, why, do you like travel for stories? Somehow, I mean, I do. I always end up traveling to, you know, Paris, Texas and not Paris, France. You know, we read the papers all over the country. And, of course, by now we've been on the air for so long that people, cops, private eyes, attorneys, prosecutors, local TV stations. They'll call us and they'll say

this looks like a great story and we don't even know how it's going to come out but if you wait too long somebody else will get there ahead of you so we start making calls as soon as we hear about things. Although sometimes you've got to wait for a decade before you can get it on television. Because usually the police and prosecutors

won't talk with you until it's over. But if you wait until it's over you'll be beaten by everybody else. And Blaine, you're the new kid on the block. What can you add to this as far as, you know, stories and what have you noticed now since you just started? So a couple of things. I mean, I think, and I've said this before, but I've been a Dateline viewer much longer than I've been a Dateline correspondent. So it's very interesting and fun to come at it from this perspective.

I've always felt that there's a secret sauce about Dateline, right, that kind of makes our show different from the others and stand out. And that's what each correspondent is able to bring. But I also think it's the connection that we're able to have specifically to the families. I mean, I think that one thing that really stands out is you kind of see the heart of the person that we're talking about. It's not just about this terrible thing that happened, but it's about this person, the gifts they left, the people they left behind. So I love that we're able to bring that out. And in terms of connecting to people, that's something that I've loved so far. You know, we're talking about getting to know each other in these kind of events, but it's really critical to our success of having people trust us and know us.

And when we're asking people to tell what sometimes is a devastating story or a dark portion of their life, or some violence that had visited their family. They don't want to tell it just anybody. They want to tell people they know who they respect and who they trust. That might explain why we have this sort of unwritten rule at the deadline, the no-jerk's rule. There's another word we use. There's another word.

But the people who work at our program are all wonderful people. They're brilliant, they're intelligent, but deep down, they have tremendous empathy, and they're very kind people. And everybody works together really well. Yeah, and that's why they're trying to be here. No one ever leaves the show. The people behind the camera, the people you don't see are the big stars of daylight.

They are what make that program. They just say, all right, Keith, just go in here and ask questions. Or do you specifically work with the producer? How does that work? Very much so. Very much so. It's always a partnership. And these things, you cannot go in without some sort of idea of what you need to ask this person. But then, having established a kind of a program of approaching the interview,

it's then just a conversation with somebody who is either a victim of a crime, a family of a victim of a crime, or potential perpetrator. And you know what they're going to say, because maybe you went to the trial or you heard their testimony. And I'm not talking about if they're the guilty person. You know what they're going to say if they're the prosecutor, if they're the cop, if they're the defense attorney, if they're a family member. So, and let them say it.

I want to hear him say it. And then I'm going to ask them questions about it. And that's generally what they're not expecting. Like, they want to make sure they get out that thing that they came here to say. By the time we get to these interviews, all of us are so well-versed in a story, right? Either it's something that we've looked at from the very beginning or read or gone to the trial, like Josh said. So by the time we get into those interviews, you know the material, you know the information and the facts forward and backwards. And you can anticipate any sort of way that the interview could go.

So you have to go in with a good level of education to be able to say, no, that's not true. I spent so much of my career doing stories for that evening's newscast, you know, one minute and a half, two-minute stories. And you go in and do an interview and you're watching the clock because you don't have time to edit. When I did my first dateline story, I was struck by how much it takes to get the sound bite. Interviews would go on for an hour, hour and a half, which was crazy to me. But then I realized what was happening, you'd come back around maybe the... the third pass at the big question, and suddenly there it was. Wow.

It would reveal itself. I get the question asked a lot of times. How does it feel to be inside the prison sitting with a stone cold killer, toe to toe? It's not a Hannibal Lecter, Lex Luthor, Master, Criminal Experience. They're kind of dull schmotes. And they tell the same old story wrongfully accused, wrongfully convicted, and they tell it like a smooth river rock over and over. I'd barely get a quote out of it. I did an interview a couple of years ago,

a story called After the Dance about a guy who'd been a suspect for a long time in his high school girlfriend's murder. It turned out he had never had anything to do with it, but when she was killed, he said they killed her, and then he gave a description of one guy, and the police latched onto that discrepancy. He was under suspicion for a long time.

Wow. And he was never charged with anything, but I had the producer, I said, tell the crew, I don't want to see his shirt collar. He's going to be the only person that we photographed that. And everybody online was like, well, that guy's locked up. Even when you guys do stories that we already know that are very famous, one of the ones in my homework, Lester, that you might have read that hit me was the Gianna Tragedy.

The Jim Jones story? I did that. I had a personal connection to that, a weird personal connection, follow me. So my mom was a manager. She managed Powers Booth, who was the actor who played Jim Jones in the Guiana story. And they needed an actress to be the first person to drink the Kool-Aid and drop, right? And so, of course, she said, I'll do it. And so she did it.

And I was very young and then, you know, traumatized by watching her drink Kool-Aid and fall on the ground. That's a whole other expensive psychiatrist bill. But anyway, so when you guys did it, I was like, I already know the story. I want to see how they tell it. I want to see how you unfold it. What are we going to see that's different? What footage did you get a hold of? And that's what I think is so special about your show.

It's just you can take things. We already know what happened and re-tell the story from a different perspective. We were lucky enough with that story. That happened in 1978. I was covering Congress at that time. And so I knew Leo Ryan, who was killed. And we were, it fortunately had happened recently. enough that there were people that you could still get who would talk about it.

Right. And so we got a couple of people to talk about it who had never given TV interviews before. That's amazing. This is a random question, but you guys, because you all have such iconic voices, Lester, if you called right now to American Airlines to cancel something, with that I'm Lester Holt voice. What kind of reaction do you get? Now, sometimes people will be cool until the end. Are you related to the Lester Hold on TV?

It's, yeah, I was down in Texas two weeks ago working on a project, and we had some one we needed to talk to about a particular story. We couldn't track her down. We got an address. We went and literally knocked on her door. And the door opens, and I said, hi, I'm Lesterhold from NBC. And she goes, oh, my God, oh, my God.

You look like Lesterhold. I am Lester. And she invites me in the house and says, honey, Lester Holtz about him. What do you have to say about this, Keith? Because you're down there, grimacing. Question number one is always, does Keith really talk like that?

Right. And the answer is, yes, he does, thank goodness. I was interviewing a sheriff one time. And I was talking to this sheriff, and I was asking him questions, and I was asking him questions this way, you know. And he looked at me. and after I asked a question, he said,

well, you quit talking like that. But I just love that about the show because even when it's just on, you hear these voices and you feel familiar and you just feel it's just good stuff, it's good stuff. So you guys tell stories in a way that makes you follow the story, but the voices and the connection is so engaging.

Blaine, what's your favorite story that you've done so far? I know you haven't done as many, but, like, what stood out, like, what kind of shook you? So a lot of them obviously are very fresh because I've been doing this less than a year. There is one, though, a story called Justice for Joy. And it was about a woman who was killed, the person who did it, set her house on fire.

And it was her young son who discovered this. He came home from school one day. He had just gotten all A's on his report card, and he was excited to tell his mom. It was like 11 or 12 years old. It was 30-plus years ago. I interviewed him. Obviously, he's a grown man today in his 40s,

But when we talked, he was giving information that registered as an 11-year-old child. And it was such an emotional interview because I could feel that coming out as a child. At the time, I was pregnant with my second daughter. Oh, wow. And so anyone who's ever been pregnant in the room knows that you're very emotional. Just a little bit. There's a lot. There's a lot going on.

But I really just identified with him so much, and I just felt for him so much. So that was just one connection. It was only my second dateline story I'd ever done. But it was a connection that I feel that I'll always have. So that always sticks with me. Awesome. Andrea, what about you? I mean, there's so many stories.

It's hard to single out. I like ones that involve some kind of adventure, whether it's like those trivia things, like hanging off the side of a mountain or going to Zambia on a safari, things like that. There was an alleged killer that I chased down in the Virgin Islands, and we were coming along on the boat, and he saw us.

And so he shut the door. And I went, oh, my gosh, we missed him, like on the catamaran. We missed him. So we went back and got some lunch. Three hours later, I said, let's take out one of those dingies. So we got a guy to take us on the dingy, and we all real stealth, went around the catamaran, got him. Just started yelling. Did you kill her?

Did you kill Sarm? Oh, my God. And he's like, get out of here. Get out of here. Wow. Just took a little bit, took a second, second try. But he's alleged. Wow.

He was never, never charged. Coming up next, the other Dateline correspondents and I are grilled by two Dateline diehards, the hosts of a date with Dateline. Stick around to find out which correspondent I would call if I were wrongly imprisoned, and the one thing Lester cannot travel without. The Dateline correspondents ask a lot of questions, but how will they fare when they're the ones in the hot seat? Joining us now are the co-hosts of the award-winning A Date with Dateline podcast, Kimberly Arnold and Katie Mitchell. Hi, ladies.

Hello. How are you? Thank you for having us. Oh, I'm so excited that you're here. You get to ask our guys, our ladies and gentlemen, some questions. And you guys are the real experts. So we're going to let you take it away. Well, I'm Kimberly.

I'm Katie. We have some fun, rapid-fire questions from our listeners and some Dateline lovers who couldn't be here tonight. But before we start, Blaine, welcome to the Dateline family. Thank you. Thank you. Have you been the brunt of any hazing from Mink? Not that I can talk about in a public for... No, I'm kidding.

Not at all. He's been like my Dateline Fairy Godfather, just kind of guiding me through this process. Everybody's been fantastic. Wonderful. First question for Josh Mankowitz, aka Sir Manke with the Hankie, as we call him.

If you were arrested for a crime, you obviously did not commit, which host would be your one phone call? From jail. I would do whatever it takes to get you off, Mank. You're superhuman. You'll hang off a building. You'll hang off a mountain.

You'll wrestle a snake. Yeah. I'd get it done. Even without a law degree or anything like that. I'd still find a way. Our next question is for Lester. You've traveled all over the world. What is the one go-to?

item for all of our world travelers out there. Something you can't travel without. Toilet paper. You bring your own role? It depends on where I'm going. Not domestically, but when I'm going to places that are inhospitable,

I've been known to that. And then well, this is going to sound weird, but I also bring peanut butter. I can live on peanut butter for, you know, for a long period. Thank you. Good one. Our next question is for Blaine. Okay. We see on Dateline often that people in their B-roll, if they

have a special hobby or a special talent, sometimes we get to see people do that special talent on Dateline. It depends. It could be pottery making, things like that. If you were in a Dateline episode, what would your B-roll be? My special talent. Oh, gosh. It could just be staring wistfully out a window holding a couple of coffee. It could be. It could be. It's definitely not swimming. Everybody knows I'm taking swimming lessons, cannot swim, but I'm getting there. I like to run. I don't know.

I don't know if that would be, I don't know how that could be incorporated something to us. Running by a body of water. Yes, that would probably be it. Slow-round. Yes. Nailed it. Excellent. Question for Queen Andrea.

Who would you rather interview again, Nicholas Rossi or Charlie Sheen? Oh my gosh. Wow. Nicholas Rossi. Question for Keith. Approximately how many things do you think you've leaned against in your lifetime? Which was your favorite lean also? What's your go-to lean?

I lean on Josh. It doesn't work very well. No, metaphorically, lean on this man. You love him. Yeah. Oh, come on. I love lean. You guys give each other a hard time, but you have

the best relationship. BFF. BFF. Just took away the mystique. I ruined it. The wonderful thing about Keith is that Keith's been very tolerant of all my antics over the years. Nice of him. Oh, and that question was sponsored by our friend Emily, who's here, who hosts the Keith Leans on Things Instagram account.

Yeah. And our final question is for Dennis. Who would you like to play you? to play you in the movie about your life and career play me why would anybody want to play me or would you play yourself

let's see who do I like oh I like the guy in the slow horses Gary Olman Gary Olman yeah Gary Olman What about like George Clooney would be good? Good choice Yeah yeah Clooney? Yeah

John George Clooney could do it No no no no that'd be good I'm not a Clooney Thank you so much for answering our questions. Thank you. We could have asked a million more. We have so many. Thank you so much. And thank you for all you do.

Yes. Let's give it up for Kimberly and Katie. To close out our incredible night at the pinnacle, we turned to the audience for questions. And they delivered. The million dollar question, how does Dateline avoid sensationalism? And more are up next.

So you all ask questions, and I have some here. So we're going to rapid fire them. All right, here we go. Keith, the shoes. How many pairs of chucks do you own? I lost track about 25 years ago. Okay. What a lot.

Side of his shoe says date line embroidered in it. Yeah, these are my favorites. Oh, they say date line. There's a date line on one side. About 30 for 30 years on the other. They're air date lines. That's kind of cool. Josh, if you were stranded on a desert island with one dateline corresponded,

who would you choose and why? For God's sake, not me. I couldn't listen to that constant complaining. I'm going to go with Blaine this time. Wise choice. Plain will take care of you. She'll take good care of. of you on the island.

It's so nice. Let's see. Blaine, what has it been like for you to step into the legacy of the newest reporter while also bringing your own perspective to the stories you tell? You got the deep question. I know, that is. That's not rapid fire. You know, it really has, it's been an honor,

I'll say that. It's been an honor to be so welcomed and so embraced, not only by everybody here on the stage, but all of you. I've gotten the kindest words and just the kindest affirmations, and I appreciate that. It has been very fun to, one, stretch journalistically, but also to

really kind of take this peek inside the human mind we always talk about. I've learned so much. It amazes me that there are so many people who think that murder is the best and an appropriate solution. And so, I guess I've just been fascinated by doing

this, by doing this job. I want to just add one thing, if I may. Please. There's a real learning curve to knowing how to do a Dateline story, knowing how to do a story that's two hours long that has to spin out over 11 or 12 acts. It's hard.

She's fast. She's a quick learn and has mastered it. Almost incident. It's amazing. Thank you. It's just wonderful to watch, actually. Love that. Love that.

Lester, what is your favorite song to play on the bass? Oh, you know, lovely day. Ooh. Dude, do, do, do, do, do, do. Yeah, that's, that's one of them. Dennis, if you weren't a dateline correspondent, what would you be doing? I would be sitting by my pool reading Harry Bosch novels.

I love it. Someone said I just want to hear Keith say wow. Keith, would you say it? Wow. Okay. Last question. Dateline, like all times, television shows has a profit motive. How do you stick to sincere storytelling and avoid sensationalism?

We don't have to think about that. You know, we do a story because we do a story. We have, we want to do the best we possibly can. If it makes money, well, you know, lucky for NBC. If it doesn't, lucky for me. That's the best answer I could think of. Anybody else want to follow that up? I like this, I like this new Keith after. dark thing. He's like a different guy. I love it. This has been an absolutely

incredible evening. I mean, now when you watch Dateline, you can say these are all your besties. Because we've all been hanging out. Wow, great. Thank you all for coming out tonight. And I want to thank the Pinnacle for hosting us tonight.

We really appreciate their hospitality. And thank you all for coming out, really, and in letting me do this. This has been a pinch me moment.