Narrator:
As communities around the country are learning, the key to effective prevention is to use multiple strategies in multiple settings for achieving one common goal. One important strategy is communications. By developing the feature series “The Deadliest Drug,” the Portland Press Herald demonstrated the power of this strategy.

Barbara Walsh, reporter, Portland Press Herald:
“ The Deadliest Drug: Maine’s Addiction to Alcohol” was an eight-day series that described the human and financial cost of alcohol abuse in Maine, and that appeared in the Portland Press Herald for eight days, and it was a series that had everyone in the state talking about what we need to do about alcohol abuse in Maine.

Kurt Hazlet, managing editor, Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram:
Regardless of what it was, whether it was a crime story, very often, most often, there was a root in alcohol. Traffic accidents—the vast majority of those seemed to be alcohol-based. Health issues—everything seemed to revolve around the issue of drinking, yet this was nothing that was ever articulated. There were several stories that came out. Such absolutely chilling stories that they couldn’t help but connect with readers, and that was pretty much the point of what we were doing. There was a story that looked at a rather poor family that was devastated when the husband and father was killed in an accident by a drunk driver. This story was especially compelling because the man’s son survived him and was really just devastated by the loss of his father, and there was a really memorable photograph of the son sitting next to a wooden cross. The family was so poor, especially after his death, that they weren’t able to buy a headstone, and it was just an utterly grim photograph that accurately portrayed a pretty grim reality, which is that families are really ripped apart by this sort of thing. As the week went on, we got a lot of reaction, almost all of it positive, as people began to read these stories and to get a sense of just the enormous impact that this social problem was having. We had people who called to say that the series had actually changed their lives. This is demonstrated to some degree by the numbers. There’s a rehab program here in town at one of the hospitals that reported a substantial rise in requests for treatment after the series ran.

Barbara Walsh:
As a journalist, you can hope that you go into this business because you want to be a watchdog, you want to take a look at the community and hold a mirror up and say, “Hey, guess what? There’s some problems here,” and let those citizens look at it and say, “Well, should we do something?” And you hope that when you do write these projects that people will care, and they’ll say, “Hey, we’ve got to do something.”

Kurt Hazlet:
I think the biggest impact that the series had was to serve as a catalyst for a lot of people who are already working in this field. Suddenly, they had something that provided real data about the problem and the scope of the problem—not only that, it was readable, it was a teaching tool, and within a few weeks it became clear that this series in a reprinted form was going to be valuable for a lot of organizations that work against substance abuse.

Barbara Walsh:
I mean, we had 20,000 reprints made of this series, and most of those are gone—schools called, churches, citizens and 2,000 citizens came forward to meet over the course of a year to discuss solutions, and they came up with a book called The Voices of Hope.

Narrator:
Communications efforts like the Portland Press Herald series can raise community awareness about an issue—and they can also provide materials for groups to use as tools for discussions and action planning.

Kurt Hazlet:
The newspaper worked with a number of organizations to get involved with helping the community—I use that in the broadest sense—to deal with the problem. One way we did that was through roundtables, which were formed largely by the organizations themselves, with some logistical support from us. But it was their game, and they took the effort that we did a step further. In other words, they used what we published as the teaching tool; they went out and tried to organize grassroots support throughout Maine, in towns and cities, to deal with the problem, and the way you deal with a problem like that is that you have discussion.

Elizabeth Weaver, citizen:
And that would create a kind of process where people could not just look at the issue but look at ways to maybe how they personally could have an impact on the issue, because that’s what would keep it kind of a grassroots, I think, more practical kind of level.

My contribution to that was to take it into the school. First, we kind of gave them an overview, talked about what they thought about alcohol, what were some of their impressions about it. Then the second session, we kind of brainstormed what were some solutions to that that they saw, and what the kids said, so eloquently, is, “Hey, it’s about all of us. It’s about adults too. And if you want to have an impact on this, you have to first look at what you’re doing, to set an example.”

John Cranshaw, student:
They have a lot of good information about how big a problem it really is. Going in, I read them in a health class, basically, and it was really helpful because, you know, sitting there with all these other you know, kids my age, we’re all there thinking, “Oh, we know all this alcohol stuff, we’ve heard it all before,” but I sat down with the paper and really started to read it, and there was a lot of new stuff in there.

Elizabeth Weaver:
The youth that have been involved with some of those study circles that—would I say that they never go to a party again? No. I think that’s probably naïve to say that, but I think there’s another forum for thinking about it, and there’s another way of thinking about this behavior, and what some of the risks are, that begin to set up a process for how you make those decisions and what some of the ramifications are. And I think that’s what we can hope for as a community.

Kurt Hazlet:
A great deal of discussion took place in the months after the publication, and that really had the impact, the purpose, of focusing a lot of people on a problem that they never really thought they could solve, and they still haven’t solved it. But what it did was, it allowed people to see in their own lives, what around them needed to be fixed. It was a real example of people coming together in a united fashion, first just to talk about a problem; second, to come up with solutions for it, and that process is still going. I think the best way for an organization to get attention from a newspaper is to provide the newspaper with what it needs to see that there is a story.

Don’t try to persuade them necessarily with just words. Provide facts.

Barbara Walsh:
But it’s finding the right person. Sometimes journalists are very busy with whatever, breaking news, and it’s finding that right person at the paper that’s going to listen to you and hopefully understand that this is an important story, and they’ll take it from there.

I think, as a journalist, we don’t like things pushed down our throat—someone says, “You have to do this”—but if you explain that this is a problem and this is something that the community needs to know about, then hopefully that reporter will say “You’re right” and tackle it.

Kurt Hazlet:
When I say you shouldn’t just try to persuade people with words, words can be cheap; they can also be very eloquent. But words themselves don’t necessarily carry enough weight to persuade a news editor to drop what he or she is doing and to take up another story. What really works is the fact. The fact that you know that there is a problem, you can quantify the problem, and that you can persuade that editor that by pursuing those few facts and perhaps making a story out of them—you will have a substantial piece of journalism that will have an impact on the community.