Interview with Laurence Hammack
The Roanoke Times
by: Jennifer Hanson

         At the end of his series on OxyContin for the Roanoke Times, Laurence Hammack, Virginia Tech alum, shares two dramatic stories of what he calls “the angel of life and death.”  He shows the readers two people, Emmanual Ketron, a young man in prison for the illegal use of OxyContin, and Dan Pellitteri, an injured man who uses OxyContin to get through a regular day.  Most of the series and daily stories had been about court cases, the business behind it, Congresses stance and Food and Drug Administration statistics; so, it was appropriate that Hammack end his series with human interest.  Hammack went on to win the Nancy Dickerson Whitehead Award in 2002 for reporting the series on OxyContin use in Southwest Virginia.  Here’s an abridged version of the interview:
           
Q: What type of activities did you participate in while attending college?

Hammack:  “Well, when I went to [Virginia] Tech I really didn’t know what I wanted to do career wise.  I was very undecided, and I ended up pledging a fraternity the second quarter…I got real involved in that for a while, and really kind of stumbled into journalism by working for the [Collegiate Times] on campus.  I had done some writing in high school, but I had never really considered it as a major, much less a career.  Then, I just walked into the CT one day and asked to be able to write a story.  They sent me in on deadline to cover a meeting of the Downtown Revitalization Committee in Blacksburg, which was a boring meeting.  I came back and wrote an incredibly boring story, which they put on the front page.  I got a real kick out of that. So, I guess, that’s sort of when the bug hit me.  That would have been my sophomore year, I guess.  I became more involved in working for the CT, and started taking other positions.  I wound up being the News Editor [for the CT].  I ended up getting an internship with the Roanoke Times: New River Valley Bureau, which is located in Christiansburg, my junior year.  That fortunately turned into an offer for a full time job.  I actually started working for the paper six weeks before I graduated.”

Q:  Did winning the College Gold Circle Award for page one design of the Collegiate Times make you want to write for a newspaper as a career?

Hammack: “I felt then the same way that I feel now about awards, is that they’re nice to have and they’re nice to put on your resume but…I don’t know if that’s the real reason that most journalists are in this business, to get plaques to put on your wall.  [Reporting] really is a form of public service…I think that’s the real reason we get into it as opposed to…seeing what kinds of awards we can win…”

Q:  Is that why did you got into public integrity reporting?

Hammack:  “I’m a little uncomfortable with the words ‘public integrity reporter.’  I don’t identify myself outside the newsroom as the public integrity beat.  I know it’s on the website, but it’s a name that the editors here came up with…Three or four years ago I became general assignment, which is focused more on in- depth investigative reporting…[The editors] did this big restructuring of the beat system here at the paper, which they do every few years.  They came up with this new position [that] was kind of like the position I had before, but they gave it a new name.  They called it ‘public integrity.’  The reason I got involved in it is that I just like the beat even though I didn’t like the name.  The beat that I had they kind of got rid of, so I had to do something.  So I applied for the public integrity beat and ended up doing that since about March of this year.”

Q:  Could you describe an ordinary day at work?

Hammack:  “It would be a lot easier to describe one back when I was covering the city courthouse as a regular beat, because that was very structured…For me it was between 9 and 9:30 [in the morning] would be my first trip over to the courthouse, which was right across the street [from the paper]…There are a number of public documents, dockets that are on the wall listing cases that could be heard that day in court, lawsuits that had been filed that day, search warrants that I would check to see if there was anything newsworthy.  Also, most importantly [was] mingling with the courthouse crowd, whether it [was] prosecutors or defendants…People get used to seeing you there on a daily basis, so hopefully they’ll tell you [information] as you get to know them better.  [You] develop sources…Before the courthouse closed at 4:30 [in the afternoon], I’d go over there again and repeat the process…”

            “Now, that I’m general assignment, it’s a little less structured and a lot of it depends on what stories I’m working on.  Sometimes I’m out of the office for several days because travel is involved.  Other times, like today, I’m just kind of working the phones and trying to get information that way.  It’s harder now to describe a routine day than it was when I was covering the courthouse.”

Q:  Do you think working in the courthouse, learning how to get information from people, helped you with your job now?

Hammack: “Oh, yeah, definitely.  I think you really need to sort of cover the basics as a beat reporter before you take the next step: a general assignment or investigative stuff.  A lot of times your going to end up needing to talk to people, [which] helps out a lot if you’ve gotten to know them previously…When your dealing with people with the beat that I have now, at least you can demonstrate you’ve got a working knowledge of what it is they’re doing.  They don’t need to start from scratch explaining how the process works.”

Q:  How did you get started on the series of OxyContin?

Hammack:  “As happens with many big projects, I started off not thinking it was going to be a three- part series and a whole bunch of daily stories that pretty much ran a one or two- year course.  The first story, I think, was some information that was released from the U.S. attorney’s office that dealt with the number of fatal overdoses from OxyContin in Southwest Virginia, and it was just an astronomical increase [from previous years].  I’m pretty sure I just did a daily story on that, and I started to follow it more closely…This was happening in the coal fields, which is what a lot of Southwest, Virginia is…A lot of the prescription drug abuse was happening out there.  Here in Roanoke it was more street drugs like cocaine, marijuana and heroine.  The whole prescription drug epidemic hadn’t really touched Roanoke…There was a congressional hearing in [Washington] D.C. that I got to cover and that was a lot of fun because I don’t get to go up to the capital and cover Congress very often… It’s just one of those things that I had no idea that when I did the first story it would sort of take a life of its own.”

Q:  What was it about that story that made you want to keep writing about it?

Hammack:  “…I got the sense that it was a big issue.  It was affecting peoples’ lives in a big way.  The major problem was death and addiction.  Also, I think one thing that fascinated me too was that it involved a corporation that was responsible for, and making huge profits off of, OxyContin, which of course is a legitimate drug when used the right way.  You had sort of an illicit drug that was converted to a street drug.  It wasn’t coming from South America the way cocaine does.  It wasn’t coming from the poppy fields of Afghanistan the way heroine does.  It was a legal drug that [was] coming from this big corporation that was getting rich while other people [were] using it and dying and ruining their lives…There was a New York Times reporter that wrote a book about it, and some of my stuff got foot noted in the book, which I got a kick out of, too.   At any rate, I just guess that’s the kind of story that appeals to me.  It gives it something that goes beyond Roanoke or Virginia and kind of hits on some national issues.”

Q:  What did you gain from participating in the Addiction Studies Program for Journalists in June 2004 in San Juan?

Hammack:  “…The main emphasis was looking at addiction as an illness and not as a character flaw of whoever the person is that goes out and starts snorting OxyContin and ends up robbing a 7-Eleven to support his habit…It gave me a good sense of something I kind of touched on before but really didn’t understand the science behind it.”

Q:  What was the hardest story for you to cover out of all of your work?

Hammack:  “…I don’t cover politics, but anything that is of a political nature.  When you write something that is critical of any candidate, the immediate reaction from the opposing camp is that you are being unfair and that you’re bias.  Sometimes it’s really hard to walk that line and try to, on one hand, be aggressive and fully scrutinize someone in public office, but, on the other hand, not to take it too far.  Make sure that the scrutiny that you apply to one side you’re applying equally to the other side…”

Q:  Is it difficult to leave out your biases in reporting?

Hammack:  “It’s hard to do because I mean we’re all human beings.  We all have our opinions, and of course these days many newspapers are accused of being left wing liberal rags…that are articulated on the editorial pages and that carries over to the way that we report and write our stories…Within the last week I did a story that I’ve been blasted on in some blogs, and blasted by the campaign for Jerry Kilgore…for basically being a partisan hack.  [I] still believe it was a legitimate story that dealt with his mother who is a voting official and questions about how impartial she’s been over the years in terms of supporting candidates and parties when she’s taken an oath to be politically neutral.  You develop a thick skin pretty quickly in this business….I have a hate male file…When both sides are mad at you, you know that you’ve done your job right...Fairness is often in the eyes of the beholder, as is bias…”

Q:  Do you have any suggestions for college students who want to work at a newspaper?

Hammack:  “If you want to work for a paper then I think the important thing to do is get some experience…whether it’s the CT or a summer internship at a paper in your hometown or what have you…[editors] don’t ask you what your GPA is, they ask you for your clips, and if you have clips that are solid then that’s the important thing.  In addition to the coursework, it’s always helpful to have the practical experience to go along with that.  It also gives you a good idea early on whether its something for you…its probably a good thing to figure that out in college then two years into your first job.”