By Ryan G. Murphy, Digital Media Editor

On Monday, RTNDA announced the winners of the 2009 National Edward R. Murrow Awards. On the television side, NBC won a total of five Murrows including the award for Overall Excellence in the Television Network category.

RTNDA had the opportunity to speak with Williams about the state of NBC, the digital revolution and what it takes to succeed in journalism.

RTNDA: Congratulations on winning the Overall Excellence Murrow. What do you think this award says about the direction that Nightly News and NBC are heading?

Brian Williams: It’s funny. This submission happened to be 80 minutes of Nightly News material but it speaks for every broadcast on our schedule and anyone in daily journalism will tell you that it’s just about that day. I can tell you every element if we had to go on the air right now at 6:30. I can tell you everything that’s going to be on the broadcast from top to bottom. That’ll change in the next five hours or so.

We are such creatures of the daily fight such that, at this time tomorrow, you can ask me: “what’d you do yesterday?” and I’d really have to take time to think about it because we have hit erase and reset and we are about the next day. We have to live so that if a viewer joins us for one day – one half hour a day – they will get back from us what they came to us for. It just so happens that when we’re judged on the sum total on our work, and the judges come away thinking it’s best – it’s great validation.

This award is validation for a guy I just had lunch with, Ali Arouzi, who is just back from Iran – he remained the last western television correspondent there until they could not guarantee his safety anymore. This award is for Richard Engel, who our viewers are going to see [Monday night] under fire in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. It’s for Martin Fletcher who’s been in the Middle East for years and years and Chuck Todd at the White House right now and Savannah Guthrie at the White House right now and it’s for everybody. We can’t just put me out there – we can’t do that. It would be a terrible broadcast. We are the sum of the parts and we are a collection of the professionals of NBC News. I am in the unenviable position of speaking for all of my colleagues. There’s no way I can speak for them except to shine a very bright light on their work.

Our industry is very cruel in that certain of us get a lot of the attention and some days it’s in absolute disproportion to the risk and the amount of work done so I find it difficult to express that. Having been on both sides of the ball - having been a correspondent, having had Engel’s job, having spent a fair amount of time overseas covering this nation’s dual wars, I’m just so enormously proud of our folks.

NBC won five National Murrow Awards this year, the most for any network on the television side. What do you think sets NBC apart from the rest of the networks?

This is a big, sweeping costly industry to be in and when it’s done right, to paraphrase the late Justice Stewart of the Supreme Court, “you know it when you see it.” When a story like Iran comes along, this is really where it separates out the professionals. We can’t cover this story entirely on Twitter.  We can’t do it and we won’t do it. This is the life we’ve chosen and it’s awfully nice to see our work validated by our peers. It tells me that the investment we have made in covering the news everyday is being recognized. It’s the right thing to do. This is a tough economy and the sales folks tell us “nobody’s buying ads,” but luckily we don’t have to worry about that. That’s someone else’s worry. We get to come in and do our jobs everyday. I have no idea how they pay for Nightly News or how they pay for the Today Show. I don’t care to know and no one has asked me to know but we work in a very, very costly business and I work with the best professionals on earth. It’s still a huge news division with tentacles all over the planet and when something happens, we get tested everyday. Every story that hits the wires, every time one of our bureau chiefs or correspondents calls in and asks: “Can we do this? Can we get this done? Who do we have there?” You hear that question in newsrooms everyday – “who do we have there?” This is just letting people in on a not-very-well-kept secret of our news division and that is that we are mighty proud of the work we do day to day.

Our industry has undergone and is currently undergoing a digital revolution. How has the shift to digital transformed your role as a journalist?

It’s an enormous tool and it’s an enormous adjunct and it’s an enormous assist to what we do. I am a consumer and a generator of new media. I have a pretty robust life on the Web as a generator and as a consumer. I can’t make it through the business day, nor would I want to without many, many perusals of the Web. I have a kind of standard circuit that I do. But it can’t suffice for our reporting. The only problem with running unedited Twitter feeds on the air is that you have no idea if Partygirl99 is a 50-year-old guy in his living room in Queens or a protestor in the thick of it in the streets of Tehran. Like any reporting, accuracy requires relationships and confirmation and [Twitter is] something new. So you’re hearing everything about Twitter right now. The Web was something new a number of years back and I used to joke that someday the Internet would supply all of our water and air. But they’re all tools at our disposal.

What do you think NBC can be doing better to ensure that it will rank among the best networks in years to come?
 
It’s the same pep talk a college football coach gives at halftime or a wing commander in the Navy or a platoon leader in the Army in Afghanistan – stay sharp. Stay focused. Stay great. We have a standard to meet everyday. Of course there’s the public standard for our customers, our viewers, but we have a lot of internal standards to meet as well. We like to think that before something makes it to on air we’ve put in through the ringer. Mistakes are always going to get made. We’re not immune or above that but our people work so hard and we work so hard to get it right every day and I’m just enormously proud and I think my motto would be “stay sharp,” and remaining the best and staying the best there is, is a challenge we will gladly accept.