"A New Dawn?"

(by Allan Vestal)

One of the foremost challenges of journalism is to make subjects relatable, no matter how savory their characters to the mass audience.

"A New Dawn?" by my hometown paper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, attempts to do just that. The piece follows Dawn Nicole Smith -- in many ways a stereotypical junkie -- through her experiences in drug court.

It would be easy to cast Smith, the mother of five by several fathers and a repeat offender, in the clichéd image of an addict. But by delving into the raw emotions felt by Dawn (and by her family) throughout the process, the team responsible for this piece attempt to reach beyond pigeonholing their subject.

Probably the most important part of this story was the compelling menagerie of photos from David Stephenson. The various pictures capture well the emotion and sentiments of all involved. The audio clips that are paired with the photos also help to tell the story, but I feel the photos do the brunt of the storytelling.

Also interesting about this piece is the medium in which it is presented. Reporters at the Herald-Leader pushed the audio slideshow format to its limits, adding "title cards" and commissioned music into the mix. The textual slides add a new dimension to the storytelling ability of the form, and are especially useful for telling this story, as the actions and events that shape Dawn's struggle are complex -- possibly too complex to capture in mere photos or audio clips.

The choice in adding music is also novel. In such a form of storytelling, music almost always adds a certain level of dramatism to the overall work; I feel the Herald-Leader team did well to choose a soundtrack that expressed the conflict inherent to Dawn's struggle without being melodramatic.

"A New Dawn?" captures well the emotion of a woman's struggle through drug court; having lived in Lexington at the time of the series' publication, I can attest to the compelling way in which the story was told.