Comparison With Other News Magazines
In contrast to NBC's "hard news" magazine program, Rock Center with Brian Williams, Dateline programming focuses on true crime and human interest stories, predominantly featuring a single story for the entire program. Often Keith Morrison narrates shows and cliffhangers are used prior to commercial breaks. However, on occasion, the Sunday broadcasts (airing in a time slot otherwise reserved for family-friendly programming, aside from CBS' competitor 60 Minutes) focuses on stories tailored for younger viewers, such as recent Sunday reports on teen drivers and child safety.
Dateline features a single story format, although in the past Dateline was a traditional newsmagazine with multiple segments of varying length, such as with the Sunday version. Unlike the other flagship newsmagazines on U.S. television (CBS News' 60 Minutes and ABC News 20/20), Dateline featured more character-driven stories focusing on the audience's emotional attachment to the persons featured, and fewer non-character driven international and national news stories. However, the success of Dateline led to the other networks to create additional versions of their newsmagazines, 60 Minutes II and additional nights of 20/20.
Executive producer Neal Shapiro pioneered "signature segments" that appeared regularly. These segments included Dateline: Survivor, where a person talks about their near death experience and rescue; Dateline Timeline, where a popular product, person, and music single are played and viewers are invited to guess what year it appeared in; State of the Art, explaining how something was technically accomplished in a movie; Consumer Alert, where common consumer complaints or issues, such as food safety, are investigated, Dateline Hidden Camera Investigation, a story using hidden cameras to focus on an issue of public concern, and Newsmakers, light interviews of major figures in politics, entertainment, and business, as well as regular people in the news. Dateline did cross-promotional segments with Court TV, People magazine, Good Housekeeping, and Consumer Reports. In the 1990s, a common week would feature several "signature segments", breaking news, updates on past stories, multi-part investigations, and interviews. Dateline also pioneered viewer feedback including telephone polling and a unique format, the Interactive Dateline Mystery, where viewers voted similar to Choose Your Own Adventure on where the story should go next.
The Friday night edition of Dateline features special emphasis on true crime stories programming, which includes the "To Catch a Predator" series. NBC News specials also air under the Dateline banner.
Read more about this topic: Dateline NBC
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