UNITED STATES
The New York Times
Margaret Sullivan
THE PUBLIC EDITOR
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.
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