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…