MASSACHUSETTS
news@Northerastern
April 6, 2016 by Joe O’Connell
The final scene of the Academy Award-winning film Spotlight portrays the reporters and editors who made up The Boston Globe’s investigative team fielding a barrage of calls from survivors of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal on the day in 2002 when the team broke the story.
Walter Robinson, AS’74, a former journalism professor at Northeastern and a Globe editor who led the Spotlight team, described that day as the end of the beginning for his team. Collectively they wrote some 600 stories on the scandal and earned the Globe the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their investigative work.
“I feel like our world exploded,” Robinson told a standing-room only crowd in the event space on the 17th floor of East Village. “And those phones rang for months. In just the first several weeks we had more than 300 victims just in the Boston archdiocese call us.”
Robinson shared those memories during a thought-provoking event on Tuesday evening that examined the making of Spotlight and how the work of those Globe journalists continues to impacted investigative journalism.
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