UNITED STATES
The New York Times
Margaret Sullivan
THE PUBLIC EDITOR DEC. 12, 2015
This is the second part of a look at the threatened state of local investigative reporting.
Walter Robinson was playing to the crowd. Now famous as the investigative editor played by Michael Keaton in the movie “Spotlight,” Mr. Robinson and other real-life Boston Globe journalists were in Lower Manhattan a few weeks ago, telling war stories in ProPublica’s newsroom, just before the New York film premiere.
Describing a moment in late 2001 as the Globe’s Spotlight team reported the priest-pedophilia scandal, Mr. Robinson, known as Robby, recalled seeing something he found strange on a colleague’s computer screen: “Lines going one way and lines going another way.” What is that? he demanded.
With the timing of a comic, Mr. Robinson told the answer as a joke on himself: “It’s a spreadsheet.” As intended, this got a laugh from ProPublica’s journalists, who live in the numbers-heavy world of today’s investigative reporting, where databases and spreadsheets have replaced the rumbling of the presses beneath the floor.
His story gives a tiny picture of what’s changed in 14 years. But writ large, it raises serious concerns. Digital tools are a boon to reporting, and digital distribution can make a story go global, but digital-era economics have devastated newspaper staffs.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.