A display promotes a screening of "Hooked: Tracking Heroin's Hold in Arizona" at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication building at the Downtown campus on Jan. 12, 2015. (Daniel Kwon/The State Press)After months of in-depth reporting, the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in collaboration with the Arizona Broadcast Association will launch a 30-minute documentary investigating the rise of heroin trade in Arizona on Tuesday.
The student-produced documentary, called “Hooked: Tracking Heroin’s Hold on Arizona," tells stories of people affected by heroin and expands this to talk about issues associated with heroin use in Arizona.
By taking on such a vast issue in such a well-broadcasted way, Cronkite Dean Christopher Callahan said he predicts the 30-minute documentary will spark a conversation, further adding to the story.
“We want to make this, not our only story, but our story," Callahan said. "This a continual story, and we want to own it. We want to have our students, whether they’re on the television platform, the digital platform, our public relations students or our students in the new media innovation lab, wherever they happen to be, to be continually following the story and looking for new dimensions."
Students working on the project tackled the issue on print, broadcast and digital fronts as well as an interactive app.
The idea for the documentary was brought to the table by Art Brooks, the President and CEO of the ABA, who thought ASU students and journalism programs would be a good place to expand on the issue.
Award-winning former Miami Herald investigative reporter Jacquee Petchel, along with other veteran journalism professors, helped students to produce the content of the documentary. Brooks focused on marketing and convincing all 33 Arizona channels and countless radio stations to give up 30 minutes of their primetime slot for the broadcast — a grueling task.
“When you see a clip or you look at some of the promos … you’ll get a feel for the reach and the seriousness that law enforcement, Drug Enforcement Agency, High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, all the top enforcement agencies — the seriousness they took when these journalists came to interview," Brooks said. "They gave them access where they would not normally have access."
Journalism senior Jessica Boehm worked on the print side of the multimedia investigation. She wrote an article that focused on the increasing number of drug treatment centers in Prescott and how they brought more heroin use to the area.
“We knew we were focusing on this very broad topic — heroin use," Boehm said. "So I started looking at some of the smaller communities and how they’d been impacted. I did Google searches and found there was a task force in Yavapai County that was focusing on all kinds of substance abuse, but specifically heroin … so it just started with just a general conversation with some police officers.
The documentary will be broadcast on all Arizona television stations Tuesday at 6:30 p.m.
Reach the reporter at megan.janetsky@asu.edu or follow @meganjanetsky on Twitter.
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Editor's note: State Press executive editor Danielle Grobmeier and multimedia director Sean Logan contributed to the heroin project. Jacquee Petchel is a member of ASU's student media advisory board, which provides guidance to The State Press. None of them were involved with reporting or editing this article.
