Christian Martin: A Dateline producer covers the world

Christian Martin is on his way to the Middle East to shoot a one-hour news documentary aboard a United States Navy ship for NBC News. “I can’t talk too much about this project because I don’t want to give away the story but I am excited about it,” said Martin.

And exciting is how you can describe Martin’s last ten years at NBC. He has had the opportunity to travel to Indonesia and Uganda on assignment. “A few years back we did a story on child labor in Indonesia. I had to wear undercover gear and go into factories to document very young children making toys. We also went into Hong Kong and China. It was exciting and a little bit frightening because we were in places that we weren’t welcome,” Martin said.

Martin was a field producer for “Toy Story” that won the Robert F. Kennedy Award in 1997. That year Martin was also promoted to a Dateline producer. “I had started out as a runner for NBC, making photocopies, getting coffee and worked my way up to an assistant producer and then an associate producer and finally a producer,” Martin said.

Two years later Africa would be the setting of Martin’s first international piece as a full-fledged producer. He traveled to Uganda with Mark Ross, a safari travel guide who had saved two of his travelers from Rwandan rebels. The rebels had slipped across the border of Congo and killed twelve American and European tourists.

“Ross and his clients were out observing African mountain gorillas when they came across these rebels who eventually killed two of the travelers. Mark got himself and the other two out. I wanted to follow Mark back to Uganda and tell the story of what happened and how he got out,” Martin said.

It was a very big story at the time and every news agency wanted to tell it. It took Martin and NBC almost five months to set up this story. “Since I had lived in Africa before graduate school, Mark and I had something in common. We hit it off right away and I was able to follow him on this story. It was an amazingly powerful story,” said Martin, who has an undergraduate degree in history and African-American studies.

Martin’s September 11th story is just as amazing. “When I heard what had happened, I called the newsroom and rushed downtown. When I got there I pulled out $500 from the ATM and bought a camcorder from a tourist on the street… I caught the South Tower collapse and barely made it out,” Martin said. He then rushed back to NBC headquarters in midtown and had some of the first ‘on the scene’ video footage of the disaster on network television.

Most recently Martin traveled to Washington D.C. where he documented a day at the White House. NBC had sent ten crews and Martin was assigned to cover the oval office for that day. “As a history and politics enthusiast, it was a great learning experience to see how things really worked at the White House… All the chairs had nameplates of people in history that had sat there before or the rooms had past presidents and politicians had been in… That place is just shimmering with history,” Martin said.

This is all coming from a person who before graduate school was not sure whether he wanted to be a journalist. “When I got to NYU I fell in love with journalism. New York City is the perfect canvas for journalists because there are a lot of great stories even for graduate students,” Martin said.

If it’s one thing Martin wants journalism students to know, it is to make the most of every opportunity. “Whether your getting coffee or producing a story, if you do a good job you will make it to the next level,” Martin said.

By Halima Kazem, ‘02G