Weekly gets national praise for hard-hitting package on local cost of opioid epidemic, 'the elephant in the room' - Entrepreneur Generations

Sharon Burton

A Kentucky weekly recently published a hard-hitting package about the impact of the opioid epidemic on the community. And to make sure everyone read it, editor and publisher Sharon Burton mailed free copies of the Adair County Community Voice to all 8,000 households in the county, Al Tompkins reports for Poynter.

The stories included one about how social workers failed to prevent the death of an infant who, along with his mother, tested positive for methamphetamines. Another story talked about how drug cases were overwhelming local courts and jails, and a third story told of a local mom whose 23-year-old daughter died from a fentanyl overdose after she couldn't get an opioid prescription refill, Tompkins reports. 

"This is the elephant in the room. It is here and it is something we have to, we will discuss," said Burton, who won the Al Smith Award in 2016 for public service through community journalism. "For people who are thinking, 'Hey, you are writing a bunch of negative stuff about our town,' I say it is because we love our town."

Adair County (Wikipedia map)

The package is unusual for a weekly, said Al Cross, the director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, which publishes The Rural Blog. "Weeklies don’t like to cover this topic — it reflects poorly on the community," Cross told Tompkins. "When they cover stuff like this it is only from a criminal justice point of view. It is a health story. It’s a community well-being story. It is the kind of thing communities ought to work together to solve."

It's notable that Burton chose to cover addictions as a community issue, and not just as court cases and criminal complaints; that tends to stigmatize the issue, Cross said: "Community newspapers need to step up … to bring awareness to the problems, not sweep them under the rug."

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/33QOsFn Weekly gets national praise for hard-hitting package on local cost of opioid epidemic, 'the elephant in the room' - Entrepreneur Generations

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