KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter
June 26, 2018
By Bill Mitchell
[See also a screen shot of this appreciation with a photo of Kathy Shaw.]
Before the credits roll at the conclusion of “Spotlight,” a list appears showing 105 cities and towns in 41 states and another 101 places in 29 countries “where major abuse scandals have been uncovered.”
It was a fitting close to the Academy Award-winning film that told the story behind the story of the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the clergy abuse scandal.
Kathy Shaw, the journalist who helped put those places on the map of this searing landscape in church history, died Sunday after a long illness.
For more than 15 years, Kathy played a remarkable behind-the-scenes role as the driving force of the Abuse Tracker blog.
The Tracker started at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in 2002, moved to NCR at the end of 2003 and was adopted in 2006 by Bishop Accountability.org, where it operates today.
If journalism is the first draft of history, Kathy Shaw compiled the essential index of one of the church’s most important and painful chapters.
I started the Tracker a couple of months after the Globe’s first story in January 2002 and recruited Kathy as a volunteer collaborator a few months later. At the time, I was running Poynter.org, a resource for journalists wrestling with the transition from print and broadcast to digital.
Far and away the most popular feature on the site was the blog created by Jim Romenesko, who tracked issues and developments across the world of news during one of the most tumultuous periods in its history. The success of Romenesko suggested to me that the clergy abuse story could use something similar.
As Kathy’s dedication to tracking the story became clear, I began thinking of her as the Romenesko of the abuse story. Through the Tracker, Kathy helped the various stakeholders — not just journalists, but survivors, attorneys, church officials, probably even perpetrators — get a daily handle on what was unfolding as one of the most important, chaotic stories in the world. With its audience expanding, the Tracker clearly was outgrowing its original fit with Poynter. Thus the move to NCR.
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.