NEW YORK
Columbia Spectator
BY CATIE EDMONDSON AND J. CLARA CHAN | SPECTATOR SENIOR STAFF WRITERS | MARCH 28, 2016
Hailed for its powerful depiction of investigative journalism, the film ‘Spotlight’ tells the story of how the Boston Globe’s investigative team uncovered the continued sexual abuse of children in the Roman Catholic Church.
The team’s coverage of the scandal—a series of 600 articles spanning a period of two years—won them a Pulitzer Prize. But the film, which won the Oscar for best picture, served as a high-profile ode to the power of local, investigative reporting at a time when large-scale layoffs in newsrooms have become unsurprising, with expensive investigative teams being the first to go.
At the heart of the story are the journalists and editors on the Spotlight team themselves—among them, Sacha Pfeiffer, currently a columnist and reporter for the Globe and Walter ‘Robby’ Robinson, the Globe’s editor at large. Pfeiffer and Robinson sat down with Spectator on Friday to talk investigative journalism, the importance of outsiders, and whether journalists can really have friends.
On how the Catholic Church investigation changed how they approach reporting:
Robinson said that the experience made him realize that more time needed to be devoted to looking for victimized populations who have been run over by institutions.
“Those are the kinds of stories you don’t really need a whistleblower to find—you can just walk out the door literally and just look around you and you find those types of stories,” Robinson said. “I think we’re sort of more sensitized after dealing with so many people in the case of the church that had been victimized, more sensitized to the fact that often, journalists are the only voice for the people when they’re getting swooped.”
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