The Everyday Horror of Heroin Overdoses

A heroin overdose can happen in libraries, in restaurant bathrooms and in moving cars as unconscious drivers travel on the expressway. Heroin overdoses occur in public places and private residences, sometimes in your neighborhood.

Heroin overdoses happen everywhere people are.

This is the devastating, never-ending story of heroin addiction throughout America that The Cincinnati Enquirer wanted to tell.

So during the week of July 10-16, 2017, the newspaper dispatched 60 reporters and visual journalists to document how the opioid crisis had its grip on its community. 

It called the project “Seven Days of Heroin: This Is What an Epidemic Looks Like.” This year, this massive effort shedding light on the epidemic earned the staff of the Enquirer the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting.

Meg Vogel and Carrie Cochran

“Word on the street was that we might be a finalist,” said Carrie Cochran, a visual journalist who was the producer for a 31-minute video documentary that accompanied the narrative in the winning package.

Cochran was in the newsroom on announcement day, gathered with others around the television. She was connecting with visual journalist Liz Dufour through FaceTime to show her the newsroom as they awaited word.

“She starts screaming, and I’m like, ‘What?’ Our feed was delayed (but Dufour’s was not), and as I’m looking at my newsroom, I figured it out, and I’m trying to compose myself, so I don’t spoil it for my teammates,” Cochran said.  “It was unbelievable. We were in shock because we didn’t believe it. I don’t think any of us, none of us, really thought it was going to happen.”

In an uncommon approach, the Pulitzer award cited both the writing and video in the series.

“We still live in a text-driven newspaper world,” Cochran said. “To see them (the committee) actually call out the video … I can’t describe that.”

The staff might not have been prepared for the celebration, but that wasn’t the case for putting the story together. The entire process involved a high level of coordination and organization, including lots of data spreadsheets, several terabytes of raw footage on five hard drives, storyboards and plenty of teamwork.

The “Seven Days of Heroin” story began three years ago when reporter Dan Horn came up with the idea to do a more substantial story on the city’s heroin problem. The issue wasn’t going away, though viewer and reader fatigue were worrisome. What would the paper’s audience value? What would the community learn from another heroin story?

“We originally thought it’d be a few days, and then life happened, and years passed, and it continued to be something on Dan’s list,” Cochran said.  “Finally, our editor at the time said to go for it, and it became ‘Seven Days.’”

Meg Vogel, an Ohio University graduate who initially interned at the Enquirer in 2011 before being hired in 2014, was the assistant producer on the video.

“There were plans to make phone calls, to collect stats, to do ride-alongs,” Vogel said. “We had at least one ride-along planned every day because you can’t predict when you’re going to be with an EMT team when something happens.”

Dufour and Cochran worked full time on the story during the seven-day stretch. Cochran said they wanted the day, night, morning and everything between. They worked closely with reporter Terry DeMio, who also narrated the video.

“I requested all of the 911 digital logs, only using the ones that happened in public spaces,” Cochran said.

“There was some concern for privacy, obviously, but also it told you just how bad this problem is that you can be at the library, and there’s an overdose happening in the children’s section and in the parking lot,” she said.

The 911 calls were important to identify locations that are usually quiet, serene places that had become overdose scenes. The B-roll of these locations as they returned to normal helped reinforce the fact that the overdoses were happening everywhere.

Vogel, who shared editing duties with Cochran, said they also needed details, such as wide-angle establishing scenes and shots of clocks to show the time for sequencing of days. They asked for raw, unedited footage, including iPhone video from writers, body cams and surveillance footage

Vogel said she and Cochran’s particular styles and tones of their work match up really well. They constructed things separately and then brought them together on to the timeline.
The idea of a 31-minute video was not in the cards at first.

“I’ll be honest with you,” Cochran said. “We were not given the go-ahead to make this a half-hour piece. It was originally slated to be four to seven minutes, with text over it, and just stats and very quick video bites.”

“We had to work in secret to some degree until it was time to show people the piece. Not everyone was happy that it was a half-hour,” Cochran said. “I think people finally came to the realization that it needed to be this. We felt very strongly about the subject matter. We witnessed some pretty incredible things that week, and it would have been a travesty to not show people in that way.”

The video also validated what newspapers have been doing in recent years: producing documentaries that are “as long as a piece of string,” as one of Cochran’s English teachers once told her, meaning it needs to be as long as it needs to be.

A project this big also was a team effort and emphasized collaboration across the newsroom and the staff’s investment in the community, Vogel said.

“We’re not flying in and leaving. We’re accountable to them (the readers) at the grocery store and when we walk across the street because they know who we are,” Vogel said.

Since the Pulitzer was announced, Vogel and the Enquirer visual staff continue to tell impactful stories. Cochran, however, before the prize was awarded had accepted a position as an investigative documentary videographer with the E.W. Scripps Co. in Washington, D.C., where, she says, the company likes what newspapers are doing with documentary-style video.

Lori King has been a staff visual journalist with The Blade in Toledo, Ohio, since 2005. She also teaches digital photojournalism and visual storytelling at three universities.

Voices of the Media podcast interview with Carrie Cochran and Meg Vogel

This article also appeared in the  2018 May/June issue of News Photographer, the magazine of the National Press Photographers Association.