This article is part of The Poynter 50, a series reflecting on 50 moments and people that shaped journalism over the past half-century — and continue to influence its future. As Poynter celebrates its 50th anniversary, we examine how the media landscape has evolved and what it means for the next era of news.
When you think murder, you think “Dateline.”
When NBC launched “Dateline” as a newsmagazine, no one knew the hold it would eventually have on American culture.
Thirty-four years later, “Dateline” has helped make true crime one of the most enduring genres in media, influencing rival shows like “20/20” and “48 Hours,” as well as the wave of true-crime podcasts that followed. “Dateline” is embedded in pop culture: A 2011 “Saturday Night Live” skit featuring Bill Hader donning a shock-white wig as a comically sadistic Keith Morrison has nearly 8 million views on YouTube.
We invoke “Dateline” to suggest tragedy, suspense and suspicion. Episodes like “Mystery in Big Sky Country,” “A Little Patch of Perfect” and “Even the Devil Went to Church” invite us to unravel the mysteries before the hour is up. And when we can’t, they leave us marveling at the twist for days after.
The first episode of “Dateline” aired on a Tuesday in March 1992, with three parts: Stone Phillips investigated drug labeling issues, Jane Pauley interviewed young men living with Down syndrome, and Brian Ross took on a direct-mail scam targeting conservatives.
But not once in the hourlong episode was there a scorned mistress to question or a vengeful ex-husband to chase down.
In the first season of a show that has come to be synonymous with grisly deaths, there was hardly any murder at all.
“I came to ‘Dateline’ in ’95, and we were not covering crime. In fact, we didn’t cover crime for the first 10 years that I was here,” said Josh Mankiewicz, a “Dateline” correspondent. Then, around 2005, an executive producer told Mankiewicz the show wanted to start producing hourlong episodes about murder.
Mankiewicz was skeptical.
“I remember saying to him, ‘Really?’” he said.
But it worked. In fact, it did more than work. Today, “Dateline” is the No. 1 most-watched newsmagazine franchise. Between April and June of this year, “Dateline” reached 92.1 million viewers, up 3% from the same period last year, according to NBC. The show has expanded to streaming platforms, launched podcasts in 2019 and added a Spanish-language program in 2025, making it more accessible than ever.
As it turns out, people have a craving for crime.
“Dateline” correspondent Andrea Canning understands this craving. Agatha Christie, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were a crucial part of her childhood. She was captivated by local news and loved any mystery she could get her hands on.
Canning spent years as a journalist covering everything from the Supreme Court to the Iraq War. When the chance to join “Dateline” came in 2012, it was a no-brainer.
“I said, ‘You don’t know me yet, but this job is absolutely perfect.’ So here I am now, almost 14 years later,” Canning said.
Senior executive producer Liz Cole calls herself a “Dateline lifer.” She came to NBC as a college intern in 1993 and later joined a small documentary group. When “Dateline” needed extra support, Cole was loaned to the show for two weeks. Those two weeks turned into a career. She watched “Dateline” grow from airing one night a week to two, then five.
Cole credits much of the show’s success to its roughly 100-person team of reporters, writers, editors, producers and correspondents. Together, they navigate high-pressure situations and complicated assignments.
Over its 34 years on air, “Dateline” has covered some of the nation’s biggest stories: the Sept. 11 attacks, the Columbine shooting, the killing of JonBenét Ramsey and the O.J. Simpson trial.
But the vast majority of the more than 3,000 “Dateline” episodes aren’t about the tragedies and scandals every news station is covering.
They’re about the horrible things that happen to everyday people.
Executive producer Paul Ryan, who has been with “Dateline” since 2011, explained the appeal.
“People don’t look at the Alex Murdaugh story and say, ‘Oh my god, that could happen to anybody in my town, or me.’ But they might look at something that happens to a normal, seemingly normal family, normal couple, and say, ‘Wow, that just looks like my town,’” Ryan said.
At “Dateline,” anyone can pitch a story. Viewers can send in suggestions, while the story development team scours local news sites for possible leads.
To prepare for an episode, correspondents read articles, court transcripts and affidavits. Sometimes, “Dateline” sends producers to meet with the family ahead of time to see whether they might participate in a story.
Being a “Dateline” correspondent requires a lot of travel, often for weeks at a time. Producers try to factor in where correspondents live when assigning cases. Typically, Canning and fellow correspondent Blayne Alexander cover the East Coast, while Mankiewicz and Keith Morrison cover the West Coast.
Once they’re on site, it’s nonstop. Correspondents speak with victims’ families, police officers, judges, lawyers and often the killers themselves. On average, each interview lasts three hours.
“Dateline” correspondent Lester Holt speaks with mothers who lost their daughters in the July 2025 flooding at Camp Mystic in Texas. (Courtesy of NBCUniversal)
Canning said she prefers not to have questions written out ahead of time. “If you’re reading what’s written on a page and you’re word for word, it’s gonna feel very rigid and not authentic or organic,” she said.
“It’s a conversation. It’s not a job interview or an interrogation,” Mankiewicz added.
“Dateline” aims to present these real-life stories in an accessible, familiar way.
Perhaps that’s why so many “Dateline” segments begin with grainy photographs of victims and their families, the kind you’d see in a photo album on your coffee table.
Lester Holt, who joined as anchor in 2011, introduces the stories from an ominously dark, empty room.
At the beginning of “The Trouble at Dill Creek Farm,” Holt promises viewers “a mystery from the heartland that will haunt you.” And “Dateline’s” mysteries do haunt us, often unfolding in places that seem quiet and safe, places that look like our own backyards.
The familiarity is part of “Dateline’s” strange appeal. The vast majority of “Dateline” viewers are women. And many of the dangers depicted on the show are disproportionately familiar to women: According to the United Nations, are six times more likely than men to be the victim of violent crime perpetrated by intimate partners or family members.
Watching stories about violence unfold on screen can offer a kind of catharsis as well as a warning.
“Everybody has been in a relationship that did not end the way they wanted it to. And this is about those choices and the things people do in that situation. And that’s something that everybody can relate to,” Mankiewicz said.
“Dateline” is as much about how communities respond to murder as it is about how murders happen. It’s also about how absurd and convoluted crimes can get.
One of “Dateline’s” more memorable stories, “The Thing About Pam,” followed the bizarre case of Pam Hupp, who was later charged with murdering her friend Betsy Faria. Years after Faria’s death, Hupp impersonated “Dateline” producer Cathy Singer as part of a scheme to divert attention from the Faria murder that ended with another killing. The story became a 2022 miniseries starring Renée Zellweger as Hupp.
Asked which stories he’s proudest to have worked on, Ryan immediately pointed to the three nights Lester Holt spent inside Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola, in 2019.
Angola is the nation’s largest maximum-security prison, located in a state with the second-highest incarceration rate in the country. At the time, the prison had been undergoing reforms for years. Holt slept in a cell with a steel toilet and a metal-frame bed. At mealtimes, his food was shoved through a slot in the door. His cellmate was serving time for murder and had spent four years without going outside. Some inmates in their 80s had been locked up since they were 15.
“That was a super compelling hour. And I think it really shed a lot of light on what life is like in prison and who maybe shouldn’t be in there anymore,” Ryan said.
The team at “Dateline” is conscious that its reporting can do more than inform the public about the criminal justice system. It can affect the system itself.
A 12-part “Dateline” series called “Conviction” followed New York inmate Robert Rosario, who was convicted of murder in 1996. Rosario was released in 2016 due in part to former “Dateline” producer Dan Slepian’s two decades of reporting on wrongful convictions.
And because “Dateline” often begins reporting shortly after a crime occurs, the team may have no idea how long a case will take to resolve. Many take months or even years.
“I always joke, I’ve had multiple pregnancies in a ‘Dateline’ episode because it’s taken so long to solve,” Canning said.
But why true crime? We don’t watch “Dateline” for the same reasons we go to the theater to see slasher films, though there is some obvious crossover: unthinkable acts of violence, shocking betrayals and electrifying suspense.
In “Dateline,” there is decidedly less gore and sensationalism. But there is also more justice.
“There’s somewhat of a feeling of satisfaction at the end of most episodes that the bad person has been caught and they have faced a jury and they are going away for a very long time. And so it’s sort of that ending that gives you the satisfaction. You know, this person is paying for what they’ve done,” Canning said.
Still, looking across thousands of “Dateline” episodes chronicling all manner of horrific crime, you could be forgiven for coming away thinking that human nature is fundamentally cruel and violent and senseless and vindictive.
But that’s not how Canning, Mankiewicz, Cole and Ryan see it. To them, “Dateline” stories highlight another side of humanity — the resilience of communities, the love of family and friends and the goodness that exists even in the face of unimaginable evil.
Mankiewicz pointed to reforms created in response to individual victims, including Megan’s Law, which requires information about sex offenders to be made public, and the Amber Alert system for missing children.
Blayne Alexander conducts an interview for “Dateline,” which has spent more than three decades refining its distinctive approach to true-crime storytelling. (Courtesy of NBCUniversal)
“Dateline” is about good people and the bad things that happen to them, and how families and communities persevere and seek justice. It’s also about how our criminal justice system works, what happens when it doesn’t and what people can do when it fails.
Canning and Mankiewicz often speak to people in the aftermath of the worst thing that has ever happened to them. The grief is fresh, and so are the anger, heartbreak and confusion.
For Canning, a mother of six, the stories she tells often remind her of what’s out there in the world — the kinds of dangers her kids might encounter. She said she does her best to protect them, but can only hope that they’re surrounded by good people with good intentions.
“Dateline” is about crime, yes, but it’s also about what came before — the lives victims led before those lives were taken.
“These stories are not just the story of how somebody died. They’re also the story about how they lived and what they meant to the people they left behind,” Mankiewicz said.
“Dateline” tells these stories perhaps better than most. Not just stories of murder and tragedy, but stories of the people behind them. The hourlong format gives “Dateline” room to linger. The music builds dread, as do the slow pans of the camera across the quaint American landscapes where horrible things have happened. The voices of the correspondents, from Morrison’s undulating cadence to Mankiewicz’s gritty and urgent tone, set the scene and invite viewers into it. The deliberate pacing of each episode unfolds as a murder becomes a mystery, a victim becomes a person and a case becomes a story you need to see through to the end.
But what shines through most in “Dateline” is the care and attention paid to each case. And that can last beyond the episode.
Mankiewicz is still in contact with the mother of Brianna Denison, whose case was the first he covered for “Dateline.” Canning, while on vacation in her Canadian hometown, planned to meet with the family of a victim whose “Dateline” episode aired last November.
“The thing that I always want to keep in mind is that when this is over I go on to do another story, but they don’t. This is with them forever. And there is this wonderful idea that arresting somebody and locking them up brings something called closure. But any family who’s been through that will tell you that that doesn’t really exist,” Mankiewicz said.
After decades at “Dateline,” the people who make the show don’t seem eager to leave.
Canning said people tend to leave “Dateline” not for other jobs, but when they reach retirement age.
“And Josh is never going to retire,” she added.
“I’m never going to retire,” Mankiewicz agreed.