Make It Memorable: Writing and Packaging Visual News with Style

This essential guide to visual storytelling for news media students and professionals, grounds you in proven techniques while it lights your path to the future of new media storytelling in the digital world.

In Make It Memorable, former NBC News correspondent Bob Dotson and New York Times visual investigations producer Drew Jordan present a unique and engaging hands-on approach to the craft of visual storytelling. The third edition offers new insight for the digital age and a step-by-step explanation of how to find and create all kinds of visual stories under tight deadlines. In addition to new scripts annotated with behind-the-scenes insights and structural comments, the book includes links to online videos of all the story examples.

Each chapter includes

• Detailed story scripts with video cues, audio cues, story tips, and links to the final productions online.
• Discussion questions to reflect on and apply the chapter’s content to your own stories.

Additional book resources

• Glossary of Script Cues
• Reporter’s Checklist for every story

New to the third edition

• Insights on new media and digital open-source journalism from Drew Jordan add to Bob Dotson’s classic framework for engaging storytelling.
• Chapter 9: Lighting the Path to What’s New draws on Drew Jordan’s EMMY and Pulitzer Prize winning work with the New York Times Visual Investigations unit to reveal the latest digital tools for building stories with deeper, richer visual-based narratives.
  • The chapter script analyses the New York Times’ piece: ＂Day of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol.＂
  • New digital sources and tools include satellite maps and geospatial imaging, bodycam footage, user-generated smartphone footage, and social media content and data.

Bob Dotson, special correspondent for the NBC Today show, has more than forty years of experience in the field of broadcast journalism. His long running ＂American Story＂ segment is one of the most honored series in network television history, winning more than 100 awards, including eight Emmys. Dotson has received more than seventy awards, including six Edward R. Murrow Awards for ＂Best Network News Writing＂, top journalism awards from DuPont-Columbia and the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation, numerous National Headliner Awards, the Sprague Memorial Citation from the National Press Photographers Association, and the William Allen White Foundation’s 2015 National Citation for long-standing journalistic excellence in service to the profession and community. Drew Jordan is a motion design, graphics, and creative visuals specialist on the Visual Investigations team at the New York Times. He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for coverage of Russia’s bombing of hospitals in Syria, and has been a graphics editor and producer for 4 News and Documentary Emmy Awards. Before joining the New York Times in 2017, he worked as a creative lead for NBC, and prior to that ran his own studio specializing in motion design for journalistic and documentary productions.