As a story, “Seven Days of Heroin“—the Inquirer’s September 10, 2017 feature, talks about a week in the life of the opioid crisis. When I was reading this news, I feel like I was watching a script. The plot is compact, which makes people feel compassionate. However, unfortunately, this is not a script created; this is what happened in our society, in reality. I like this news to sort out each event’s time, which allows readers to have a clear idea of what happened in the day. I also like the daily data summary, which makes people impressed by the impact of heroin spread. Besides, the photos in the news are very real. We can see the track marks on heroin addicts. As a member of the family, I feel like your body does not just belong to yours. If you take heroin, maybe your child will be a heroin addict from birth. You may also make your family lose you because of heroin.
This project used many real-life examples to describe what happened to heroin addicts. But as text news, I think the text is a bit too much. It will make some people impatient to read it, which may lead to the loss of the purpose of editing this news (I think the purpose of this news is to let more people know about heroin, understand heroin addicts, and understand the harm of heroin). As a news piece, I think the words can be more condensed. Like to list the key content of each day, sum up what happened in one or two sentences. If the news want to present a real-day life, I think it is better to use a documentary style storytelling to record all the things and publish it, which may be more convincing, attractive, and shocking than text.
Shiyun Li (Sharon) 