Life in the Wrong Lane

“From Wounded Knee to Warsaw, from Northern Ireland to the Middle East, veteran newsman Greg Dobbs shares a career’s worth of adventures and misadventures in one of the best jobs on Earth: network correspondent. If you’ve ever wondered what happens right before the camera goes on or after it’s turned off, this is the book for you.”
—Dan Rather, HDNet Television

“Greg Dobbs could always be counted on to get the story no matter how tough or dangerous the conditions...and now he lays out how he did it. It’s all here—the humor, heartache and zest for a good story as experienced by one of television’s premier news correspondents.”
—Sam Donaldson, ABC News

"Greg Dobbs is a brilliant storyteller. Someone I always counted on to file the smartest, most interesting reports. He delivers once again with Life in the Wrong Lane."
—Rick Kaplan, executive producer, CBS Evening News. Former executive producer, ABC World News Tonight, former president, CNN

"Greg Dobbs lifts the curtain hiding the magic and mayhem behind a television correspondent’s reports on war and confrontation. He bursts the pomposity of network news by confessing that he once surrendered to a cow. The en he switches to a terrifying tale of escape from slashing machetes and tank fire, after being dumb enough to try to do a stand-up in the middle of a firefight during the Iranian Revolution. The is book shares the stories behind the stories, the ones foreign correspondents save for each other on late nights in smoky hotel bars when the story’s been filed ..."
—Ann Imse, Associated Press Moscow correspondent during the fall of the USSR

"This volume is written in the brilliant and impressive style that we have come to expect from Greg Dobbs. The e adventures that he describes are both hair-raising and hilarious, and give us back-door access to the kinds of problems that journalists meet. You will enjoy it, guaranteed!"
—Tom Sutherland, longtime hostage of terrorists in Beirut

“Dobbs captures the adrenaline, the fear, the fury, and the funny parts of being eyewitness to history. These ‘stories’ behind the stories reveal what it’s really like to dive for a deadline or put your life on the line for a story. Greg Dobbs is a newsman’s newsman; relentless in his pursuit of a story, brutally honest in his reporting, and hilarious in his tales of the hunt.”
—Tom Foreman, correspondent, CNN

"Greg Dobbs's memoir de guerre of his salad years spent reporting for network television is, as only a journalist could find it, a delightful gambol through the battlefield . With a keen eye for detail, Dobbs manages to capture the humor and absurdity of situations that just about any normal human being would find terrifying, insane, or life-threatening. And like a number of us who were privileged to live through the era when the big broadcast networks felt it their obligation to at least attempt to cover news stories from the outside world, Dobbs recalls those marvelous times when coverage expenses were secondary and a correspondent faced possible reproach for one reason only: missing the story.
—Jim Bittermann, CNN senior correspondent, Paris

Engaging. Illuminating. A recipe book for how the sausage is made—and what it tastes like.”
—Frank Sesno, GW University and former CNN correspondent

Author Biography

Greg Dobbs worked at ABC News for 23 years, first as a producer, then for most of his career as a correspondent, including ten years overseas. He won two national Emmy Awards in the process. When ABC asked him in 1992 to move from his home in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains to New York City, it took him approximately one nanosecond to say no. That led to a second career as a radio talk show host, a newspaper opinion columnist, and the television moderator of an Emmy Award winning discussion program on Rocky Mountain PBS. In 2003, Dobbs returned to the road as a correspondent for the all high definition television network HDNet. It put him back on airplanes, reporting documentaries for the program “World Report” from around the country and around the world. A native of San Francisco, Dobbs has been married to Carol for more than thirty-five years, and both their grown sons, Jason and Alex, are better skiers for sure, and probably better writers too, than their dad.