The Ninth Floor

I looked at a couple of multimedia stories from One in 8 million and Mediastorm. When I viewed "The Ninth Floor" by Jessica Dimmock, I felt like I did not want to look at any other story. As a curious journalist who is always looking for more interesting news stories, I decided to look at one more and then decided there is no way I would write about anything else other than "The Ninth Floor."
This story is about three drug addicts: Jessie, Dionn and Rachel who lived in an apartment with a man named Joe Smith in New York City. The new roommates of Smith's were all drug addicts, which influenced him to also be a drug addict. Once Smith ran out of money to pay their rent, they were all evicted. All of them split up. Jessie was addicted to Heroin and Dionn and Rachel are on Methadone. Jessie was in and out of the hospital. She had trouble staying clean. There were photos of when she was in the hospital, she was doing morphine, which was her medicine. Dionn and Rachel were an item. They had a violent but loving relationship. The couple conceived a baby and luckily the infant did not have any Methadone in its system. Dionn went back to school and Rachel is watching the baby. The information said that the photographer followed these people for about three years. She followed them through the highs and lows of their drug addictions.
I loved this story because reading and listening about drug addicts always intrigued me. Even though drug addicts are everywhere, everyone is different. Drug addicts are people too. I would always think about how they are low lifes and I should not feel bad for them because they made their decisions. But at the same time, I always think that they have the potential to do great things if they quit their addiction and pursue on their dreams they use to have.
This photographer had a lot of different styles. She had a combination of the landscape portraits and the action shots (an instant which it was like a film). The photos were beautiful and very powerful. When I was looking at the photos, I cringed, I shivered and my eyes watered. There were photos of them inserting the needles into their arms, they were naked, having sex and some other disturbing endings. The audio added a lot to the story because while viewers see the photos, you can tell who is talking and their emotions they must be feeling as the interviews wore on. There were also captions on updates of the subjects.
I thought the photographer did a really good job presenting the subjects in their good days and bad days. I was not a fan of the photos of them being naked. It is not that I am offended by those photos, but I felt that they were unnecessary.
Overall, I thought it was a great piece of journalism. What I look for in a multimedia story is if I can relate to it, if my attention span can last longer than five minutes and if I feel more than one emotion. What was compelling about this work is that it took three years to put everything together. It showed that it took that much time and the journalist did such a good job editing everything to the T.