Making a Big Splash, Watching it Ripple Back

The Maine Sunday Telegram used the entire front page to launch its series on alcohol use. The series continued for the next seven days in the daily Portland Press Herald and in the next Sunday’s paper.

We didn’t want to have one component without the other. But we put great emphasis and energy on the storytelling aspect. We wanted to bring the cold, hard facts of computer-assisted reporting to life. We wanted to show this story through the eyes of the people whose lives had been consumed or forever changed by alcohol.

Six months later, the team of three reporters and a photographer produced a stunning eight-part series, “The Deadliest Drug: Maine’s Addiction to Alcohol,” that spanned 44 pages and documented alcohol’s swath of destruction across Maine.

So important were the findings to our community, we believed, that on the first day of publication, Sunday, Oct. 19, 1997, we devoted the entire front page to the series.

It was a blockbuster journalistic endeavor, and the largest and costliest project we’ve ever done. Still, we braced ourselves for a lukewarm reaction from the public, reassuring ourselves that, nevertheless, the series provided a vital public service. At worst, we feared complaints that it was too long, too depressing, too focused on a single subject.

We were wrong.

Our readers’ response was so sudden and expansive that it challenged our ability to meet their demands to search for some solutions. If it hadn’t been for our public journalism moorings, we would have been poorly prepared to react.

Instead, we’re now navigating a new course of partnership with our community.

Alcohol’s Impact

Our project team learned that alcohol abuse:

• Costs every man, woman and child in Maine $853 a year — slightly more than $1 billion — in lost wages, emergency services, criminal justice system costs and health care. Maine’s annual state budget, by comparison, is $1.8 billion.

• Causes the deaths of 400 people each year.

• Triggers 80 to 90 percent of the state’s crimes.

• Costs an astounding $270 million a year in alcohol-related crimes.

• Afflicts more than half of Maine’s families: one third are headed by an alcoholic; more than half of the state’s adults report a family member with a severe alcohol problem.

• Forces the state to take nearly 500 children away from their families each year.

• Challenges the legal system’s ability to keep drunks off the road. A quarter of the nearly 6,000 people convicted of operating under the influence in 1996 had two previous convictions; a tenth had three or more.

• Fattens Maine’s coffers. The state took in $64.5 million a year in alcohol sales yet spends just $7.4 million to combat all substance abuse.

• Burdens substance-abuse treatment centers: More than 80 percent of Maine residents entering treatment centers cite alcohol addiction, compared to 52 percent nationwide.

Stunning Impact

Immediately, newspaper sales skyrocketed; empty racks at corner stores became commonplace. The series became the talk of the town — in grocery stores, offices, gyms, town halls, day care centers, coffee shops. Radio talk shows picked up the topic, other newspapers wrote about it.

The Lincoln County News lauded the series in its lead editorial: “We don’t often devote an editorial to praising the work of another news organization,” the paper wrote, “but The Portland Newspapers’ current eight-day series… has been so powerful and convincing that it deserves the admiration and serious attention of all of us.”

More specifically, there were other signs that we had struck a deep chord.

• More than 800 readers called or wrote to applaud the series.

• Admissions to alcohol treatment centers rose dramatically; at Mercy Hospital’s Recovery Center, for instance, admissions to the in-patient clinic rose 45 percent after the series was published.

• Attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings soared across the state.

• About 10,000 reprints of the series sold out in five weeks; a second reprint is planned.

A number of citizens — educators, health care specialists and civic leaders — approached the newspaper with a simple request: How can we continue the dialogue that this series has started? How can we channel the public concern prompted by the series’ disturbing findings? How can we help combat this public health crisis by helping citizens come up with solutions?

More important, these citizens proposed a solution: What about a series of study circles around the state?

The newspaper had already experimented with using study circles to inform its reporting. Since 1994, the paper has sponsored five study circle projects, covering elections, education and citizenship, including one with help from the Pew Center.

We had pioneered a template for engaging citizens in public policy discourse.Now, the interesting thing was that the public — our readers in Maine — had come to expect us to apply that template to public policy problems.

We hadn’t thought of using study circles in our report on alcohol abuse, but our readers did. And they asked us to share our knowledge of how to use that template to address solutions to the problem we had uncovered.

They asked: Is there a way to create a series of community-based study circles, in all the different towns and cities of Maine, that would provide a venue for citizens to talk about this problem and to come up with solutions to it, from their own communities? Can you help us sponsor this event? Can you show us the ropes? Can you give us resource support?

In the end, the newspaper signed up as a partner — along with 11 other community groups, including the state Office of Substance Abuse, the Portland Public Health Department and the Roundtable Center. We coalesced as Maine Communities Face Alcohol.

We offered this new civic action group office space in our former printing plant and the assistance of our community coordinator, Jessica Tomlinson. The group meets weekly to plan logistics for convening statewide study circles, which will be held in late March and April and be guided by trained facilitators.

For four weeks, hundreds of Maine citizens will hold a statewide conversation on ways to combat alcohol abuse. At the end, each community should have a unique plan for addressing the problem locally.

Other media have expressed interest in this endeavor, including Maine Public Broadcasting, WCSH-TV, WGME-TV, the Bangor Daily News and the Portsmouth Herald.

What was it about this series that resonated with such impact? Clearly, the citizens reacted strongly because they felt empowered to act, to try to make a difference. By letting people read about other people like them, about communities like theirs, we broke the silence that isolates alcoholism. By reporting on the problem in a way that invited readers to admit there was a huge problem in Maine, we also, we now realize, invited them to take a step toward action.

And the step they wanted to take, study circles, was the most accessible to all the people. Unlike a blue-ribbon legislative panel, study circles allow anyone to participate.

“In the beginning, none of us reporters knew how big a problem this was,” said team reporter Barbara Walsh. “We felt it was our job to make the readers understand what we were finding.”

From the database research, “we had great numbers; we had amazing statistics about how many people in Maine were dying from alcohol,” said Walsh. “We used the money angle to show what every person in Maine is paying for this problem. But we used stories about people to show the humanity behind the tragedy. Can you ignore the story of a 17-year-old pregnant girl who gets killed in a drunk driving crash? Or the fact that 80 percent of your prisons are filled with inmates who got there because they raped or killed or robbed while drunk?”

The stories sent the community a message: “This is our problem. This is something we should all care about, even if the people who need help are strangers to us.”

Team reporter Meredith Goad agreed: “This is what you get into journalism for — to have a real impact on people’s lives.

“There is a fine line here between assessing the problem and putting it out there for the community to see, and actually becoming involved with the process of drafting solutions. How close is too close? I think that’s something that we as a newspaper have to keep talking about, have to be aware of, as this study circle process unfolds.