‘Dateline’ Writer: The Most Surprising Part Of My Job

When I tell people I’m a writer at “Dateline NBC,” I get a variety of reactions. Often I hear, “Cool! What’s Lester Holt really like?” Or “Do you think that husband really disconnected his wife’s oxygen tank while they were scuba diving on their honeymoon or was it just a bizarre accident?”

However, sometimes I detect a look of mild horror, the kind I imagine trauma surgeons and cops get. It’s a look that says, Wow, you spend every day immersed in all that darkness. Isn’t it depressing?

When I first started at “Dateline,” the show followed a different format. We covered consumer issues, did investigations and profiles (one was of a young and sunny Taylor Swift, no less), and offered plenty of human interest stories. But times change and so does the audience. True crime is where our audience went and we met it there with, I like to think, an arsenal of journalistic talents: expert storytelling that captures victims, families and killers in all their human, complicated glory; the highest standards of fairness; and maybe just as important as anything else, true respect for the lives that are taken and the loved ones left behind.

Still, I admit the subject matter is dark. Nearly every episode involves a murder, or at least a disappearance. We do some powerful stories about the wrongfully convicted, but those people are usually convicted of killing someone. Death almost always figures into what happened in one way or another.

I work on the “open” of the show: the minute and a half at the top that highlights the most dramatic parts of the story. It includes things like: how many hearts the victim touched, how shocking the crime was, and how depraved the killer’s actions were. In short, it’s made up of the saddest, starkest, most potent stuff. Like my colleagues in this strange, very particular universe, I have developed an eye for small moments that reveal deep emotion, whether it’s anger or grief. And I’ve written the words “a chilling discovery,” “a savage assault,” and “a bizarre twist” more times than I care to count.

So, yes … dark. And, of course, heartbreakingly sad.

Many of our greatest and most popular writers — including Stephen King, Gillian Flynn, Edgar Allen Poe and Agatha Christie, to name just a few — wrestle almost exclusively with sinister themes, like violence and murder. People don’t tend to think of their work as “depressing.” Spine-tingling? Yes. As well as engaging….