BOSTON
The Wire (India)
October 15, 2017
By Beena Sarwar
Behind the glamour and awards lies another story, about the importance of documentation, synthesising information, consistency and follow up.
Hearing Walter Robinson talk about the process behind the most well-known investigation by the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team that he led, I’m struck by some universal truths that emerge from his reflections.
The Oscar winning feature film Spotlight (best picture, best screenplay, 2015) is based on the story of how Robinson’s reporting team in 2002 exposed the Catholic Church’s cover-up of child sex abuse by its priests. The Globe won a Pulitzer in 2003 for public service for its coverage of the issue.
But behind the glamour and awards lies another story, about the importance of documentation, synthesising information, consistency and follow up. That is the first truth I take away from the wide-ranging talk by Robinson, now the Globe’s editor at large.
In June 2002, the Boston Globe published a book, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church, based on the reports published until then. The following year, Robinson hammered out a 2,000-word piece “within a few hours” for Harvard’s Nieman Report (March 2003) outlining what lay behind his team’s string of over 900 reports by then.
The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) published a 22-page case study in 2009 about the journalism involved in this series. The author was young novelist and freelance writer David Mizner. A couple of years later, while discussing the possibility of a film based on one of his novels with Hollywood producers Nicole Rocklin and Blye Faust, Mizner pitched the idea of a film based on his CJR report.
The enthusiastic producers flew to Boston. The Globe journalists, initially somewhat bemused and wary, gave the young filmmakers rights to their story and agreed to work with them. They didn’t expect much to come of it.
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