Chancellor Robert Hemenway, left, and Bob Dotson chat before Dotson spoke Saturday during Kansas Editors Day at the Kansas University Union. Dotson is known for his reporting on the NBC's Today Show and NBC Nightly News.

NBC News may consider him a correspondent, but Bob Dotson prefers the title of storyteller or “emotional archaeologist.”

It’s what the 60-year-old Kansas University alumnus challenged current journalism students to become in an era when “we are always going to be scooped by the amateur who has a cell phone or a Web page.”

Dotson said journalism will change dramatically in the next five years as news consumers become more and more in control of what they watch and when they want to watch it.

“We can’t continue to cling to the top rung and shout headlines,” said Dotson, the featured speaker at Kansas Editors Day, sponsored by KU’s School of Journalism. “The way to survive is to go back to our roots and tell better stories.”

Dotson, who graduated from the school in 1968, is well known for his in-depth human interest stories at NBC, where he’s been telling stories since 1975. His reports, known as “American Story with Bob Dotson,” play on the “Today Show” and “NBC Nightly News.”

During his Saturday afternoon speech, he described a tornado he once covered in Kansas. While all the other reporters were chasing around city and state leaders, Dotson said he was hanging out with a man in bib overalls.

As the tornado victim was going through the rubble, the man picked up a big pile of pink goo, Dotson said. That’s when he remembers the man turning around to the camera and saying, “It caught my teeth, but it didn’t get me.”

“At 23, I got more reaction to that story than anything,” Dotson told a packed Alderson Auditorium at the Kansas Union. “People love to see themselves on TV. : You go where the pack is not.”

Dotson’s remarks touched home for many.

“He had a really unique spin on the approach of being a journalist,” said Kimberly Westphall, KU junior and broadcast journalism major, of Andover, who videotaped Dotson’s speech.

“It makes me wish I could’ve pursued my career in journalism, but we can use it wherever we are,” said Margery Handy, who graduated from the school’s original class in 1947 but went on to be a homemaker.

Dotson has earned more than 100 awards for his storytelling, including four National Emmys.

Dotson said he’s proud to call KU home.

Beginning at 6:30 a.m. today, Dotson said, he’ll begin work on a story about the youngest doctoral candidate in the history of the United States, a 15-year-old who also happens to be the best-selling author in Taiwan.

Then he’ll head to the birthday party of a 100-year-old man who still runs marathons.

“People want insight,” Dotson said. “But they also want to be told in a way that it sticks.”