1999 Batten Award Winner
The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram
“The Deadliest Drug: Maine’s Addiction to Alcohol”
A courageous effort to listen to the silences in the community – not just the buzz. The newspapers used computer-assisted reporting, then put human faces on the statistics as they reported the true costs to citizens of the use and abuse of alcohol. But they didn’t stop there. They responded to reader requests to help launch study circles in 1998 that undergirded the dialogue and gave the topic a legacy throughout the state. To have thousands of people involved in an ongoing discussion is what civic journalism is all about.
– The Batten Award Judges
Jeannine Guttman, Editor and Vice President:
“The alcohol series came out of our managing editor noticing a lot of little briefs and stories in the paper, everything from traffic accidents to domestic violence, where alcohol seemed to be the common denominator. So he wondered if there was something there. So we put some of our investigative folks on it, and said your only charge is to answer this one question: What is the impact of alcohol abuse in Maine?
“They started to find really amazing data. Maine does not have a lot of statistics on databases, so we had to create databases. And when we started to churn through them we found some staggering numbers. And as the series went along, we talked to our reporters a lot about writing the piece, putting some compassion and story telling behind the data.
“So it was this really wonderful mixture of compelling story telling and numbers. And we ran it in the paper and, every day that the series ran, we got more and more community reaction to it. It was like riding a wave. It was as though people in Maine knew alcohol was a problem, but they did not know the extent of it. And they also didn’t really want to talk about it. So that when the paper talked about it, it broke this silence and people, I think, felt comfortable finally addressing it.
“After the series ran, a group of people from the community came to the newspaper to meet with the publisher and me and they said: “You know those things you do called reader roundtables and study circles? Well, we think you need to do one with this. Because everybody in Maine is talking about this.
“So we agreed to be part of setting up, as a catalyst, these roundtables around the state. And then we covered them. And they all came together and I think there were 70 to 80 communities that ended up doing something around the topic of alcohol use all over Maine. And some of them started youth centers on their own and some of them started after-school programs aimed at kids, and there was a whole spectrum of different solutions that communities came up with. But they did it on their own and then we wrote about them.
“It’s really important to emphasize that we did not know as we were proceeding down this path where it would take us. And I think, in some measure, that’s what makes civic journalism to some journalists a bit frightening. Because it’s a path you are blazing and you haven’t blazed it before.
“We had reported these facts that people in Maine did not know. They were all talking about them and wanted to solve them and I think that happens a lot, actually, if we really thought about it. The media present something, people say, ‘Wow, this affects me where I live, this affects my kids and my neighbors and I want to do something, so let’s do something.’ And, then, where’s the media?
“If we reported on those things, I think it would complete the circle.”
Tom Ferriter, Assistant Managing Editor:
“This project was not supposed to be part of our civic journalism program. Civic journalism is something that happened to this project, sort of like spontaneous combustion.
“This stared out as a piece of explanatory journalism. We set out to meet a very ambitious goal, to document the impact of alcohol abuse on the people in the state of Maine.
“The response was just overwhelming … One day we just literally papered the walls of the corridor in the newspaper office with print-outs of e-mails that we’d gotten and with letters that people had sent in, most of them telling us how alcohol had touched their lives. How somebody in their family had been an alcohol abuser, maybe they themselves had struggled with alcoholism over the years, they had lost somebody to a drunk driver. Just personal stories that were very moving, very powerful and certainly told us that a large number of people had been very deeply touched by what we’d done.”
Jessica Tomlinson, Community Coordinator:
“It became public journalism when all of those e-mail messages went to my in-box and my editor said, ‘What are we going to do?
“So we took a big risk. We partnered with 11 different organizations, none of them media partners, very different for us. And we said, ‘Let’s try it. Let’s have a state-wide dialogue on the impact of alcohol abuse in this state.'”