By Donald R. Winslow
LEXINGTON, KY (October 11, 2007) - When the series "A New Dawn? A Kentucky Mother's Struggle Through Drug Court" is published starting this coming Sunday in the Lexington Herald-Leader, and as it goes live on the newspaper's Web site as a multimedia package, it will represent four years of work by photojournalist and NPPA member David Stephenson and reporter Mary Meehan as they followed a drug addict's struggle to get clean after she was sentenced to treatment - not prison time - in drug court.
The project revealed that in Fayette County, KY, only two out of five people sentenced to drug court manage to stay clean.
Herald-Leader editor Linda Austin said the newspaper made the commitment to the story because "Almost everyone knows someone touched by substance abuse. In Kentucky alone, 375,000 need treatment. Because of stagnant funding, only 1 in 12 will get help." The series also points out that substance abuse causes more U.S. deaths (120,000 annually) than any other preventable disease, and is a contributing factor in at least half of domestic violence cases, child abuse, and property crimes. Recent studies have concluded that one of the most promising treatments, while still imperfect, are drug courts (which will be in place in every Kentucky county by the end of this year). Kentucky has invested $56 million in drug courts.
Stephenson and Meehan spent hundreds of hours and miles documenting the journey of Dawn Nicole Smith, who came into drug court as a a 22-year-old mother of three who had forged prescriptions for pain pills to feed an addiction that started in her teens. The six-part print package will run as 18 inside newspaper pages over six days, and it was the result of more than 8,000 photographs of Smith with her children, relatives, and the men in her life, both in and out of court and jail. In addition to shooting still photographs, Stephenson recorded more than 10 hours of raw audio which was edited into the six online chapters of "A New Dawn." The online package is 15 minutes long, includes 130 photographs, and features audio from Smith along with original music by a local Lexington hip-hop group.
The journalists worked on regular daily assignments during the four years, making time for Smith's addiction story in between assigned work. Meehan conducted dozens of interviews, and researched hundreds of court documents and reports on drug addiction, law, and substance abuse. They spent so much time with Smith and her family that some very intimate moments were witnessed and recorded. Despite pressure from Smith's family about the newspaper's presence she insisted on them being in her life in the hope that her story might help someone else who is struggling with addiction, or a family member who suffers from substance abuse problems.
"The very root of the project began in January 2003 and it was based on a general assignment that I had, to go cover a drug court graduation. By the end of the graduation I was really blown away by what I'd seen and heard," Stephenson told News Photographer magazine today. "The stories they were telling about their journeys were amazing. Of course, these were the success stories and not everyone has a success story. This was when the problems with OxyContin were hitting the national media big time, and we were doing our own stories on it, they were calling it 'Hillbilly Heroin.' We were doing stories about the drug, and the police cracking down on it, but we weren't doing anything about people recovering from it."
After photographing the drug court graduation ceremony, Stephenson said he "stewed on it for about six months. Then I talked to Mary Meehan about it and told her about the drug courts. We started asking permission and working our way up through the chain, the courts and lawyers and case workers, and showing them examples of our work [from the paper]. Finally in the spring of 2004 they said okay, but then we had to find a participant who was willing to let us photograph and write about them."
The duo wanted to find someone who was early in the drug program so they could document the whole sequence. "When we met Dawn [Smith] she was about 1 month into the program and the day we met her she was scheduled to go to jail because she'd had a dirty drug screen." Smith agreed to let them tell her story, and that's how the project got underway. "Typical drug court cases graduate, if they're going to graduate, in one or two years. But Dawn couldn't break it and it took her a long time to have this resolved, three years," Stephenson said.
The Herald-Leader's editor Linda Austin is the second or third editor to deal with the project, Stephenson said, as she recently joined the newspaper. At least two editors before her saw the merit of seeing the project through to the end. "It's been through a number of project editors too," Stephenson said. "It's been on the back burner for years while we worked on it, and it sort of just became 'furniture' on the projects' list, people would say, 'Whatever happened to that story?' It just became normal that we were doing it up until it came time for it to run. Then editors started realizing the scope of it, and then it became a bigger deal."
Stephenson has been an NPPA member since 1991.
The Herald-Leader says their daily circulation is 108,000 and Sunday circulation is 134,000, and their Web site averages more than 10 million page views per month. The newspaper is owned by the 150-year-old McClatchy Co., the country's third-largest newspaper chain, and the Herald-Leader has won three Pulitzer Prizes.
