By Tran Ha
A Reporter at The Poynter Institute

The story: Life for children with drug and alcohol-addicted parents.

The purpose: Use a few children's experiences to tell the story of others and bring attention to a nationwide problem.

The dilemma: In reporting the story, the reporter finds the children are neglected, malnourished, and mistreated.

As a reporter, what would you do?

This scenario was on the minds of journalists following an ethics discussion at The Poynter Institute, a non-profit school for journalism. The case study was "Orphans of Addiction," a two-part series chronicling children and their drug and alcohol-addicted parents. The series, which appeared in the Los Angeles Times more than two years ago, raised ethical concerns nationwide with its disturbing depictions of life for the child subjects.

One concern that sprang from the discussion was whether the children were left in a vulnerable situation much longer than they should have been.

The reporter, Times urban affairs writer Sonia Nazario, spent five months reporting on the children and two months writing the story. What could have been done during that time to minimize the harm to these children?

Terence Oliver, Akron Beacon Journal art director, said he thought Nazario did not need to spend as long as five months reporting on the children.

"I think the power was up front," Oliver said. "Just the subject matter itself was powerful. How much ammunition do you need?"

Oliver, who adopted a child from a situation similar to those of the children in the story, knows first-hand about the physical and emotional scars that result from neglect and mistreatment.

Other journalists echoed Oliver's concern about the amount of time it took for the story to be published.

"I thought it was a remarkable piece of journalism," said Mike Wendland, a Poynter Fellow, "but to take that amount of time to get the job done is unacceptable."

In hindsight, Nazario said the amount of time spent on writing the series was "one of the most legitimate criticisms I got. I think if you're going to do a story like this you'd better get it out fairly quickly."

For Laurie Nikolski, an associate editor for The Journal News, in White Plains, New York, the biggest lesson that came out of the discussion was the importance of front-end, ethical decision-making.

"The newspaper should have and could have been better prepared for the reaction they were going to get," Nikolski said. "I felt that the reporter was left adrift in the process. I think she needed more support from editors from the beginning."

Nazario said she agrees and thinks there is generally not enough ethical discussion between reporters and editors in newsrooms.

"I don't think editors bring it up often and I don't think reporters bring it up often," she said. "If I had discussed the story more at the beginning, it might have saved me some of this criticism. I don't think it would've saved me all of it, but some."

The most important thing to keep in mind is that if Nazario was able to find these children, so should child protection services, said Tena Ezzadine, an investigative reporter for WBNS-TV in Columbus, Ohio.

"Stories like this one -- stories that capture society in its rarest form -- need to be told," Ezzadine said. "I think the worst thing we can do as journalists is to back away from stories like this from fear of negative publicity."

"It's impossible to do some of these stories without doing any harm." Nazario said. "The question is how much you observe and how you balance that with showing what is going on and the good that might come with showing what's going on."

It was a reminder that sometimes great journalism doesn't end with a tidy, comfortable ending, said Al Tompkins, broadcast group leader at The Poynter Institute. A lot of the story's power lies in the fact that it was not conveniently resolved, he said.

"I thought in the end it was a very powerful piece of reporting and she served the topic and the people involved and the public well," said Nikolski. "I think very often when you follow children's issues, the individual child either becomes lost or becomes just something to hang the issue on. Sonia brought the children to life."