WVU journalism students investigate opioid settlements

For the students in Teaching Associate Professor Ashton Marra’s spring 2025 investigative reporting class, a full semester’s worth of data collecting, analyzing and reporting paid off in the best way possible. 

The 22 journalism students in the WVU Reed School of Media and Communications worked together on a project that became known as “The Price of Recovery,” which was inspired by Marra’s work with the nonprofit Reporting on Addiction. 

“I knew I wanted my students to tackle these opioid settlement funds,” said Marra. “Before the semester began, I asked some West Virginia journalists what could our students do to help journalists do this reporting long-term? What I heard from those reporters is that they had a good baseline understanding on what was happening with this money at the state level, but they didn’t have a clue what was happening at the county level.”

“I focused the investigative reporting class on collecting the documents and public records at the county level to get us a sense of how counties were functioning and what decisions they made about this funding,” Marra continued. 

Throughout the semester, students filed dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to see how and where West Virginia counties were spending their portion of the massive global opioid settlement. Five graduate students led teams of undergrads, each one focusing on a specific research area and assigned a list of counties to FOIA. 

Marra’s class used the third-party site MuckRock to organize and send FOIA requests and store the data collected. Because students were assigned specific counties to FOIA, there was a high likelihood that each would find information not related to their specific research area. Subsequently, students had to work together to record the data and ensure it made it to the correct work group.

Throughout the project, the investigative reporting class collaborated with student journalists and a professor at Morgan State University who were covering how Baltimore City used its settlement funds. The Reed School has had an ongoing partnership with MSU for nearly a decade. 

“While the Morgan State reporters were working with a different set of circumstances, we were still able to share our learning processes with each other,” said Marra.

Once the data was compiled, patterns began to emerge and stories began to take shape. Marra’s class produced four investigative articles for 100 Days in Appalachia that were then published across West Virginia, by both local papers and statewide news organizations. 

“W.Va. Counties Set the Rules for Opioid Funds—with No One Watching” tackled the lack of oversight for the way counties spend settlement dollars and the extreme variation in how organizations apply to receive that funding. Hannah Heiskell wrote the story, with contributions from Ella Grove, Emma Turner and Blessing Omaleko. 

“W.Va. Opioid Settlement Funds are Supposed to Reverse Years of Crisis. In Several Counties, They’re Being Used to Pay Regional Jail Bills” examined several counties’ decisions to use their settlement allocations to pay outstanding jail fees before funding treatment or prevention programs. Claudia Di Lima reported, with help from Lauren Taylor, Aidan Cornue and Spencer Yoke. 

“Politically-Connected W.Va. GameChanger Program Receives Opioid Funds Amid Doubts from Experts” covered how GameChanger, a kid/teen-oriented prevention program, had been implemented in several counties, paid for with settlement funds, but had no set standards and lacked evidence-based programming. Jessica Riley and Drew Solt co-wrote the article, with contributions from Mary Delaney and Zakariah Issah. 

“‘Not in the Political Appetite’: Despite Decades of Research, W.Va. Counties are not Spending Their Opioid Settlement Millions on Harm Reduction” explored the stigma around and challenges to syringe exchange as part of harm reduction programs and the spike in HIV and Hepatitis C cases after Charleston’s needle exchange shuttered. Ty McClung wrote the story, with help from Jonathan Edwards, Purity Siroir, Tyler Cummings and Aengus Gillespie.

It was a massive undertaking and the five graduate students stayed on after the spring semester ended to finalize the reporting, thanks to the financial support of WVU Reed School of Media and Communications alumnus Scott Widmeyer and the nonprofit Reporting on Addiction. 

Teaching Associate Professor of Journalism David Smith and one of his students joined the investigative reporting team in May 2025 to create visual and social media elements to accompany the articles. 

From FOIAs to finished features

Solt, a second-year grad student, was one of the team leads who continued to work over the summer to finish the investigative articles. 

“From about the end of April until about July, it was crunch time. We spent a lot of time helping each other. We traveled around the state, and we spent several months back and forth at a local recovery center, Lauren's Wish, in Morgantown. We were able to get out into communities, see how they were being affected and talk to several folks in the community,” said Solt. 

From start to finish, it was roughly a 7-month process, spanning from January 2025 to July.

“When we are reporting on a topic that is very sensitive to a lot of people, we have to be able to gain their trust and show them that we understand that they are humans. It takes a long time to build those connections, so the first several months of our reporting was going places without a notebook or a camera,” Solt said.

 “It took a while for them to become comfortable enough to tell us their stories or show us the documents they had put in with their funding requests or tell us why they had been denied,” he continued.

Real-world impact

Solt worked on the article about the GameChangers prevention program. Because of Marra’s connections to Reporting on Addiction, Solt, Riley and the other students had access to the nonprofit’s database of subject experts, which is how Solt and Riley found Michael Hecht.

Hecht is a professor emeritus at Penn State University and current president of REAL Prevention, LLC. He has worked on many research projects focused on community- and evidence-based drug prevention programs and messaging. 

Hecht was critical of GameChangers curriculum, which lacked evidence-based approaches. At the time the article was written, GameChangers had received nearly $400,000 from multiple counties but couldn’t provide proof of measurable results.

However, Hecht was impressed by the program’s successful marketing. After Hecht was interviewed for the article, he reached out to GameChangers and has since partnered with the program to improve its lessons, incorporating his own research and work in substance abuse prevention. 

Replicating ‘The Price of Recovery’ across the country

The graduate students who worked on “The Price of Recovery” presented the class’s work at the Investigative Reporters and Editors’ National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR) Annual Conference in March 2026. 

It’s a rare honor for students to present at a conference largely attended by working journalists and other industry professionals, and even rarer for a small student group to host its own panel discussion.

The graduate students gave an overview of the project, then laid out the process and challenges they experienced. They also passed out a tip sheet for MuckRock, the software they’d used to organize FOIA requests, and one explaining how to replicate their reporting. 

“They talked about ‘The Price of Recovery’ for an hour in front of professionals and other students, and the response was amazing,” said Smith. “All kinds of journalists and working professionals came up and were in awe of what our students had accomplished.”

“We’re trying to convince newsrooms across the country to work with journalism students,” said Marra. “I had 22 students who needed to file 55 FOIAs. Each one can handle several FOIA requests, and with grad students overseeing their work, and a professor overseeing the grad students, that’s a reasonable amount of work. But one journalist in an understaffed newsroom? That’s an unreasonable task to take on.”

“There are journalism schools that partner with each other or with news organizations, but to make ourselves a resource for local, understaffed news organizations is an innovative way to think about how we act as a journalism school,” added Smith. 

Solt said he and Riley continue to build out platforms and curriculum—geared toward classrooms or newsrooms—to help professional reporters and student journalists replicate what Marra’s investigative reporting class accomplished. Two people came up to them after the panel to express interest in implementing something similar. 

One of the questions that came up during the panel’s Q&A sessions related to backlash after the articles were published.

“Public reaction is a big concern for small, local newsrooms,” said Solt. “When you’re working with sensitive topics, government officials and the community you live in, telling these kinds of stories can be challenging. Regardless of any story you write, there will be some backlash, but we saw a lot of positivity from the community, and I think that was comforting for others to hear.” 

Back in the classroom

In Marra’s class, students learned that the skills of being an investigative reporter are no different from being any other kind of reporter.

Being able to request, attain and understand documents, including complex financial or government documents, and then communicate the contents to a broader audience are skills that all reporters should have. 

“What sets investigative reporting apart is the complexity of the topics we tackle and the time and effort that goes into the reporting,” said Marra. 

“You can become a better beat reporter if you feel confident in using those skills in a small way, but if you have the basics, you can also tackle massive investigations,” Marra added.

In the real-world, journalists can rarely work solely on one, long-term investigative project at a time. More often, they are responsible for covering their usual beat while working on a more in-depth story in the background. Marra structured the class to keep students working even as they waited for FOIA requests to be filled and documents to come back. 

“You have to be a beat reporter while you’re waiting to see if there is actually anything to investigate,” she said. 

“Going through a massive, in-depth reporting project like this—with all its ups and downs—while you’re in school is invaluable. It gives you that experience, with the support of your team and professors, before you get into the workforce,” Solt said. “It’s a fun and fulfilling process, and I recommend it to any journalism students, not just the ones interested in investigative reporting.” 

West Virginia will be receiving opioid settlement funds for the next 14 years, and the Reed School is in it for the long haul.

“This is not a one-and-done,” said Marra. “We want to keep working with West Virginia journalists to make sure our communities have access to the information that they need to hold their public officials accountable.”

“Our students are going to keep filing FOIAs and asking for documents. Whether we do the reporting or not, we are going to make those documents available,” she continued. “If our students can cut down even one step in the process to help West Virginia newsrooms continue to do this work, then I’m committed to doing that.” 

WVU Reed School alumnus Scott Widmeyer began funding cross-university reporting projects with his alma mater and the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs in 2018. He is a long-time supporter of the WVU Reed School, having established two scholarship funds to benefit African-American and first-generation West Virginians seeking a journalism degree, and he currently serves on the WVU College of Creative Arts and Media Visiting Committee. He is dedicated to strengthening public affairs communications and supporting a wide range of journalistic endeavors. He aims to bring people from different backgrounds together to create content that reflects all points of view. Learn more about Widmeyer’s career and support for WVU at creativeartsandmedia.wvu.edu/about/visiting-committee/scott-widmeyer.

Learn more about the WVU Reed School of Media and Communications at mediaandcommunications.wvu.edu and follow @wvureedschool on social media.