A shocking photo greeted the readers of the Sunday morning edition of the Hartford Courant, Oct. 20. Three women sit on the floor of a white gazebo in a small New England town, probing for veins, shooting heroin. A1 and above the fold, the photo was the first thing readers saw of a five-part package detailing an epidemic of addiction in an idyllic New England town.
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Photo Director John Scanlan said the staff involved in the series, called Heroin Town, spent many days discussing the photo. He recently described his thought process for the Poynter Ethics Journal.
Scanlan: Your first reaction is: “How can this be real?” You can’t see it from the photo, but there were children in the background having a soccer game. Where are the police? How can people feel safe enough to do this in public? All those questions were answered by the reporter and the photographer.
Police reporter Tracy Gordon Fox and photographer Brad Clift had spent months in Willimantic, earning the trust of several addicts.
Scanlan: Some of the public reaction was similar, saying the photo was set up, was not real. They were questioning the truthfulness of the photographs. Some people don’t understand that when journalists are out there covering a story they witness things that other people would not be able to witness.
Scanlan said from the moment he saw Clift’s photos, he knew many of them would be provocative and alarming. At the Courant, when a project is in the works, the photo department and the page designers select all of the images and determine where and how particular photos should be played. From the beginning, Scanlan and others wanted the gazebo shot out front on day one.
Scanlan: It was powerful, on point, provocative. It isn’t that we put the photo out there to be in your face. It’s that this photograph is as on point as we could be, and there is no reason to shy away from this.
Offending readers was at the top of everyone’s list as a possible consequence for running the photo. But there were other concerns as well. The photographer and reporter were witnesses to a crime and risked getting dragged into the legal process. The women in the picture, as well as the members of their families, were stakeholders too. One of them eventually went into treatment, the series reported.
Photographer Brad Clift: I worried that these people who entrusted their life stories to us, that it would put them at risk. Even in extreme worlds, people have dignity.
From the very beginning of the reporting process, Clift said he was honest about the implications of his work. He told everyone their photos would appear in the Courant and possibly on the front page.
After the series ran, in addition to the complaints, letters to the editor and a handful of cancelled subscriptions, town meetings were called to address the problem and the state granted money to Willimantic to fight heroin. Among the critics were city officials who accused Clift of setting up the photo, insinuating he asked the women or even that he paid them to shoot up in the gazebo. In response, editors published a column in defense of the photographer.
Questions
1. How does your newsroom anticipate negative public reaction and attempt to explain the reasons behind controversial decisions? Would an editor’s note, or an “About this series,” explanation alleviate the criticism?
2. What’s the decision-making process for controversial images in your newsroom? Do you think your organization would have made a similar decision?
3. Other than running the photo or not running the photo, what are the alternatives?
