Al's Morning Meeting

The stories also point out that substance abuse is a leading cause of death. It is a factor in at least half of the domestic violence, child abuse and property crimes committed. Research has found that the most promising - if imperfect - counter to these crime statistics is drug court. Kentucky has invested $56 million in drug courts, which will serve every Kentucky county by year-end.

The journalists spent hundreds of hours with Dawn - both in and out of court. Meehan reviewed hundreds of court documents, interviewed dozens of people and researched dozens of reports on drug court, addiction and substance abuse. Stephenson shot 8,093 photos and recorded more than 10 hours of audio.

The two became so familiar to Dawn and her family that even some of Dawn's most intimate family moments were witnessed and recorded. Dawn, despite pressure from her family, insisted she wanted her story told if it might help someone else.

The result is an unvarnished look at just how intractable a problem addiction is. In Fayette County, only two out of five addicts sentenced to drug court manage to stay clean. It illustrates the special challenges faced by mothers who are addicts and the effect their addiction has on families.

David Stephenson and Mary Meehan

A. Mary: The story you’ve seen 100 times before is the recovered person reliving the life of addiction from a distance. This woman is immersed in it. Also, as you’ll see with the story moving forward, because of access to her family, we show many of the complicating factors that help trap people with addiction in a generational cycle. It does not fester as it does in a vacuum.

We write about addiction and the fallout from it all the time. But people rarely tell the true story of the huge obstacles to recovery. Drug court caseworkers say that Dawn’s is a textbook case. People outside of the social service system have little idea of the many complications.

The sidebars about drug courts, how the brain is affected by drugs, etc. are important educational tools. I thought I knew a lot about all of this, and yet I still learned a lot in the reporting process.

Q. Your team spent four years following this woman. How and why did you dedicate that kind of time to this piece?

A. Mary: We didn’t know we were going to. We thought it might take a year-and-a-half to two years. But once we were in, we wanted to stay committed. It was a rare opportunity, considering Dawn’s willingness to be followed. 

Q. How on earth did you get this kind of access to the subject of your story?

A. David: Sometimes all you have to do is ask.

It took six months for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to approve our request. I think that opened the door to the bureaucracy.

But, we didn’t get everything we wanted. For example, the instructor of Dawn's parenting classes didn’t want us to come. There were also things we covered that didn’t make the final edit. For example, I spent hours with Dawn in the hospital as she gave birth. We had to ask for permission to be there. One of the reasons was Dawn’s willingness to let us follow her.

Sometimes we asked politely several times if we thought it was an important part of the story.

After a few months, the drug court staff also recognized that we were in it for the right reasons and that we were respectful of other participants. They knew this wasn’t some sort of “gotcha” journalism.

Q. After four years of note-taking, recording audio and documenting the story with photographs, how did you organize it all? It seems like a monumental task.

A. Mary: It helped that the family was very involved in the court system. A lot of the things were chronicled in court records. But we also worked along the way, typing up notes as things happened. The first step in the writing process was a massive timeline that chronicled the whole scope of the project and included interview notes, audio transcripts and court documents.

David: Organizing the audio recordings was somewhat of a puzzle because, over the years, I probably used two or three different recording devices, like mini-disc or digital voice recorders or a Marantz digital recorder. The key was labeling the recordings with a date and subject. It did take a few days at the end to index them all.

At the end of each day’s shoot, I would copy the photos to my hard drive and used a file naming system that included the date. My notes of the day were typed in the caption field, which made for some pretty long captions, but all necessary information and names were attached to every photo. Mary said she would later find this time and date system useful in cross-checking information.

Also, what was very helpful in the editing process, was making a quick, initial edit at the end of each shoot. I would basically tag the best dozen or two photos and then copy them to a different folder, which in the end would serve as my first edit for the whole story. All the images were stored on CDs and DVDs in duplicate.

Q. The multimedia online project is probably the most ambitious your paper has undertaken. Why was it so important to take this story online?

A. David: It’s how we tell stories now. The music from a local group along with audio reinforces the emotional resonance of the story. To allow readers/viewers to hear Dawn’s voice, and the voice of judges and caseworkers, adds something that the printed paper could never do. It also reaches a different audience, a different demographic.

Additionally, having the stories, sidebars and multimedia online keeps the story alive.

Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends on the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be corrected.