The Search for Local Investigative Reporting’s Future, by Margaret Sullivan, New York Times (December 05, 2015)

This is the first of two parts exploring the threatened state of local investigative reporting.

In the recently released movie, “Spotlight,” an investigative reporter for The Boston Globe, Sacha Pfeiffer, grinds away at her job. She gets doors slammed in her face in working-class neighborhoods, she cajoles sources in coffee shops, and she pores over phone directories until the library lights are about to dim.

Her colleagues on the Globe’s investigative team, known as Spotlight, put in their own long hours. The reporter Michael Rezendes (played with manic, twitchy verve by Mark Ruffalo) hangs around courthouses and lawyer’s offices, digging out information through sheer persistence.

The movie tells the story of what the Spotlight team turned up: that startling numbers of Catholic priests in Boston, and beyond, had sexually molested children, and that these priests were systematically protected at the highest levels of the church. The Globe’s investigation, which began in 2001, took many months before a single word was published. It ended up winning a Pulitzer Prize for public service — and changing the world.

The film is powerful and moving. And it raises troubling questions about the state of local investigative reporting today and in the future.

For decades, local investigative reporting has been done largely by regional newspapers like The Globe. With their substantial staffs — often several hundred journalists — newspapers could do the painstaking, time-consuming and often unglamorous work that can lead to breakthrough stories.

But now, with newspaper profits hit hard by the sharp decline in print advertising, and with newsroom staffs withered after endless rounds of cost-cutting layoffs, local investigative journalism is threatened.

The director of “Spotlight,” Tom McCarthy, has been talking about that recently. The film he wrote with Josh Singer is gathering rave reviews, and there is talk of Oscars. But for newspaper readers around the country, the future seems hardly as rosy. “I’m not sure those who will see the movie will say: ‘Wow! That barely exists anymore.’ They are not going to know that it’s too late,” Mr. McCarthy told Variety in September. “The ice caps have melted. These papers are gone, they’re decimated.”

Dean Baquet, executive editor of The Times (and a former Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter himself) told me that cities like his hometown, New Orleans, and those where he spent parts of his career — including Chicago and Los Angeles — all are suffering from the blows to local newspapers. “When I judge contests I see a lot of really good work, but there’s no way there’s as much of it now,” he said. “I do really worry about the decline of hard-hitting local coverage with a public-service mission.”

The Times, which has maintained its large staff, has increased its commitment to investigative journalism on every desk, including Metro, Mr. Baquet said. Investigations of abuses at Rikers Island, the city’s “three-quarter” houses, and the Cuomo administration’s interference with the anticorruption Moreland Commission all came from that locally oriented staff.

And, although business prospects of The Times are far from assured, there’s good reason to hope that the paper will remain vibrant. But that’s far from true at most papers around the country.

Newspaper staffs are down by 40 percent since 2003, according to the American Society of News Editors. Put more starkly, two of every five reporters have disappeared, leaving crucial beats vacant and public meetings without coverage. Statehouse reporter ranks have shrunk even more drastically, says the Pew Research Center.

And predicting a turnaround in newspapers’ fortunes is a loser’s bet. (Some papers, however, have been able to maintain their investigative teams and, in a few cases, even expand them.)

Martin Baron — who pushed hard for the church investigation from his first day as chief editor of The Globe, and is now executive editor of The Washington Post — is uneasy about the future of local investigative reporting. “It’s a cause for grave concern,” he told me.

At the moment, he said, investigative journalism at the local level isn’t dead. “There’s a fair amount that is still going on. Some fine work is being done. But resources are diminished and the will to do this work may have atrophied.”

Budget pressure is only one factor. Investigative work is “considered something of a luxury that might alienate your readership or your advertisers,” Mr. Baron said. “And it doesn’t appear to be digital and doesn’t necessarily generate traffic” to the paper’s digital platforms.

If regional investigative journalism does die out, much will be lost. At The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the “Watchdog” team, established by Martin Kaiser, the longtime chief editor who stepped down early this year, produced one impressive project after another.

In 2013, for example, the paper revealed that blood tests to screen newborn babies for serious genetic disorders were processed so slowly, due to bureaucratic ineptitude, that babies were suffering brain damage, or even dying.

“This could have been just a feature story, or a he said/she said story,” Mr. Kaiser told me. But the paper put together a database of nearly three million newborn screening tests in 31 states. The investigation won awards; more important, it brought reform — and saved lives.

Sandra Mims Rowe, chief editor at the Oregonian in Portland during the years when the paper became known for its investigative and explanatory work, told me she still sees regional newspapers doing good digging. But there is less work as ambitious, she said, as her paper’s investigation of systematic abuses of foreign citizens by the Immigration and Naturalization Service; that project won a public-service Pulitzer in 2001.

“To spot something locally and have the sophistication and level of talent to execute it so that it has a national impact … I just don’t see the skills for that still being held very much at the regional level,” said Ms. Rowe, now chairwoman of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Of course, local newspapers aren’t the only places doing local investigative journalism. More and more, nonprofit news organizations, digital start-ups, university-based centers and public radio stations are beginning to fill the gap — sometimes in partnerships.

But they probably won’t fully take hold while newspapers, even in their shrunken state, remain the dominant media players in local markets. And many longtime journalists wonder if they can ever offer the same depth and breadth as the best newspaper staffs.

Meanwhile, there’s no shortage of bad behavior that needs exposing. Nicholas Kusnetz of the Center for Public Integrity, writing in The Washington Post, summarized a new study: “Across the country, state lawmakers and agency officials operate with glaring conflicts of interest and engage in brazenly cozy relationships with lobbyists.” Governments, businesses — and yes, religious organizations — that operate in secret and without scrutiny can be breeding grounds for corruption.

Both times that I saw “Spotlight,” I heard the audience members gasp at the final frames: the long lists of cities, in nearly every corner of America and the world, where priests sexually abused children. That knowledge is chilling, but at least it is no longer hidden. Sunlight — or a spotlight — makes a huge difference.

Clearly, local investigative journalism can’t be allowed to die out, even as local newspapers struggle to survive. The mission is far too important.

But Mr. Kaiser, the former Milwaukee editor, puts the problem succinctly: “Who is going to hold people accountable?” I’ll look at some possible answers to that question next week.