Why Lester Holt went to prison for NBC News

Lester Holt went to war-torn shows in foreign countries and smaller cities in America on behalf of NBC News. For his next trip, Holt had to go to an even more unusual place: the prison.

As part of Justice for All, a broader NBC News report on criminal justice reform, Holt went to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, the maximum security prison known as name of Angola, for a two night stay in a cell. The results will be broadcast on NBC's "Dateline" channel on Friday at 10 pm, on Sunday at 10 am MSNBC will broadcast a "city hall" retransmitted from the Sing Sing Correctional Facility, another institution. maximum security located in Ossining, New York State. the topic of the week with, among others, the singer John Legend, the former Attorney General of the United States Loretta Lynch and 25 inmates of the prison.

If the above description makes you rub your eyes with disbelief, then mission accomplished. "There is nothing normal about holding an event at City Hall in a maximum security prison," says Dan Slepian, a "Dateline" producer and criminal justice specialist who has worked with Holt on the project.

Newspaper companies are surpassing their usual activities at a time when their customers' appetite for information on a complex and rapidly changing world is on the rise. According to Pew Research, the average combined audience of Fox News Channel, MSNBC and CNN prime-time programs grew by 8% in 2018, while total revenue grew by 4% to a total of 5 , $ 3 billion. The average number of unique visitors per month in the highest-traffic US media outlets rose to about 22.4 million in the fourth quarter of last year, compared to nearly 19 million in the fourth quarter of 2014.

While NBC News is testing a multi-program approach to criminal justice analysis, CNN will no doubt examine the hearing of what should be several hours of a city hall dedicated to climate change, scheduled for tonight. Anchors will be talking with several Democratic presidential candidates on the subject by the end of the afternoon and in prime time. MSNBC and NBC News will cover another climate change forum organized by Georgetown University later this month.

The most difficult part of these events seems to be the organization, not the broadcast. NBC News had an unprecedented challenge to record its event at Sing Sing last month. The prison has stricter security measures than the White House: no external communication device is allowed in the institution. Even members of the audience for the event had to undergo security checks. And NBC News had to make sure that certain parts of its city hall – built at the jail with a forklift and other heavy machinery provided by the network – were sent from as far away as Las Vegas.

"We have never done anything like it," said Rashida Jones, senior vice president of special programming for NBC News and MSNBC. "It only takes up the spirit of this conversation in the town hall and increase it by ten notches."

The project was initiated by Slepian, which has long covered cases of wrongful conviction, and Holt, who in recent years has spent more time on reforming the criminal justice system. He was the first to interview Meek Mill, the rapper and musician who has been involved in the criminal justice system for years, for example after Mill's release last year. Holt said that his interest in the subject was partly triggered many years ago, when he was covering a deadly mortal injected man for WBBM, the CBS radio station in Chicago where he was working for many years. "You become very reflective at that time: how did we get here?" He said.

Holt and Slepian contacted Andy Lack, president of NBC News and MSNBC, earlier this year, about a broader vision of criminal justice, noting that the network could, with its various platforms and programs information, offer something that its competitors could not.

"He bought it," says Holt. "From there, it was incumbent upon us to deliver the goods."

Holt thinks more Americans should think about it. "I've been to many prisons in my reporting. One of the things I've experienced is that you have to see these inmates as people. You meet them and talk to them, and they are certainly people who have made really horrible choices in life in some cases, "said Holt. "Nevertheless, it is important that we hear them. One of the main statistics that kept me in mind is that 95% of people in jail will get out one day. They are going to be our neighbors, walking down the street next to us. They will be part of our community. So we all have to worry about it. It is in the interest of all that they leave the prison better than when they entered. "

NBC News expects to mount projects of similar depth and complexity, says Jones. "We will have very big swings over the next few months," she says. Holt will have to hope that viewers will see him come out from behind bars.

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