Mystery solved
‘Dateline’ discovers path from TV to true-crime podcast stardom
The podcast begins with the sound of a car slowing down, and then a straight-talking narrator takes over. “It was dark when the killer shut off the engine,” he says.
Over the next three minutes, eerie music kicks in and the host, Josh Mankiewicz, sets the scene: a freezing Colorado night, a woman shot in front of colleagues, a masked killer.
“Who was guilty of murder?” Mankiewicz asks. “Who was not? And who got away with it?”
A week after its Sept. 20 debut, the show, “Internal Affairs,” landed at No. 1 on Apple’s U.S. podcast chart.
That was not much of a surprise. Podcasts from Mankiewicz and his colleagues always seem to make the top of the charts. What is more surprising is where they work: “Dateline,” the long-in-the-tooth and occasionally overlooked television newsmagazine from NBC.
For years, television franchises and established news media institutions have taken turns trying to adapt to of-the-moment formats, whether digital video, newsletters or podcasts. Many times, the results are awkward and abandoned. “Pivot to video” and Facebook Live are bywords for news media experiments best forgotten.
And yet “Dateline” has transformed itself into a podcast powerhouse, churning out several original series a year, all of which have been hits.
In addition, twice a week, “Dateline” opens its vault and turns old segments from the television show into podcasts. The archival material is also a success. On any given day, the “Dateline” podcast with the repurposed TV segments is usually among the top five podcasts on Apple’s charts.
What “Dateline” has done so well for so long on television — true crime, told with relish and deep reporting — appears to have met a moment in an entirely new medium.
“At a time where it is so hard for new television programs to break through, or for new brands to be established, the fact that ours seems to have renewed life? It’s great,” said Liz Cole, executive producer of “Dateline,” who helps oversee both the television show and the podcasts.
Listeners have downloaded “Dateline” podcast episodes nearly 800 million times since the first one appeared in 2019, NBC News said. Last year, the show beat out online heavyweights including ESPN, Barstool Sports and Crooked Media in Apple’s rankings of free podcast channels.
It has been quite a turn of events for a 30-year-old television show.
The show, which premiered in 1992 with Stone Phillips and Jane Pauley as co-anchors, began as a traditional TV newsmagazine — with three to five segments that typically included interviews, features and investigations.
In the 1990s, during network television’s newsmagazine craze, “Dateline” could occupy as much as five hours of NBC’s primetime schedule each week. Over the past 20 years, the show has remained a mainstay of the NBC schedule, filling in gaps whenever called upon in addition to holding its usual Friday night slot.
“Those of us within the hallways of NBC News have always understood the value of ‘Dateline,’ ” said Noah Oppenheim, president of NBC News. “Historically, to many regimes past, whenever a fall entertainment lineup would start to wobble, we would always get the call to fill those open slots with additional ‘Dateline’ hours on the broadcast network.”
In 2005, “Dateline” began to transform, starting to move more aggressively into true crime.
With broadcast viewership steadily falling, murders simply rated better.
Soon, four or five segments became one hourlong story, with true crime as the sole focus of the series. Many episodes had a tidy beginning, middle and end, with a mystery solved — viewers preferred it that way.
By the late 2010s, the “Dateline” producers were considering adding podcasts to the staff ’s workload. The competition, they felt, was lacking.
“I got really irritated with all the amateur crime podcasts,” said David Corvo, senior executive producer of “Dateline.” “I said, ‘Wait a minute, we can do this way better than this.’ ”
So Corvo and Cole, who recently sat together for an interview in the “Dateline” offices on the 19th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York, went about trying to persuade the show’s team of correspondents to take on more work.
Keith Morrison, a veteran correspondent on the show, was not initially convinced. Morrison wondered if the workload would be too much.
“I just didn’t think we’re in the podcast business,” he said. “We’re in the TV business. It felt like going back to radio.”
But once Morrison, a veteran of TV news since the 1960s, finally gave it a whirl, he loved it. By the end of one recent week, two older TV segments narrated by Morrison as podcast episodes were in the top 10 of the Apple charts.
It has been a learning curve for the staff. Each story for the podcast is told over six one-hour episodes, requiring far different pacing from the hour it gets on television. And some things the staff once took for granted — such as using captions whenever audio from an interview or police recording was garbled — did not work on a podcast. They had to learn new tricks.
“When we figured out how to do it, by golly, it was just a delight — maybe that’s the wrong word to use for murder mysteries,” Morrison said. “But doing these stories via podcast has been more pleasurable than most things I’ve done in my ridiculously long career.”
“Internal Affairs,” the podcast hosted by Mankiewicz, consisted of six episodes, with an episode released each week. Next year, “Dateline” is planning on rolling out another four original series. The “Dateline” podcast with repurposed TV segments will continue its twice-a-week pace.
Indeed, the adaptation to podcasting has gone better than either Cole or Corvo could have anticipated.
“I used to constantly ask, ‘How do people listen?’ ” Corvo said. “I know how people watch TV — I’ve been doing it for 50 years. Obviously, we’ve figured it out, but I said to Liz once, ‘I don’t think I know what I’m doing.’ And she said, ‘Our podcasts are No. 1!’ ”
Cole finished the thought: “Of course, we know what we’re doing!”