On Thursday, I bounced in and out of a nondescript meeting room on the third floor of the AJC. I wish you had been there with me.
Around a long table in the room sat reporters and editors who have spent their careers digging deeply into stories that, in the end, have righted many wrongs and made our lives better.
These folks have exposed shoddy medical care, predatory lenders, a broken criminal justice system, inequity in political representation and on and on.
But the grueling discussion Thursday centered around a story about which I can say little. You will have to come back to us in 2016 to read and experience their work. It also promises again to right a few wrongs and change a few lives.
Remember the names around that table: Danny Robbins, Carrie Teegardin, Ariel Hart and Jeff Ernsthausen. No one works harder for you. We rarely say much about editors, but Shawn McIntosh, our deputy managing editor for investigations; and Lois Norder, a senior investigative editor, are working brilliantly and diligently to nurture and guide this important work.
What I can tell you about this story is that it offers the hallmarks of great journalism - people with compelling stories, human frailty, ineptitude and outrage. It ventures deeply into a place practically no one would explore. I expect their findings will resonate with many of you.
Reporting such a story is exhausting and exhaustive. The care they take not only with the facts but also with the truth is awe inspiring. This is comforting in a world where the truth has become ephemeral and getting the facts right competes with unrestrained urgency.
Even though humility has become quaint, newspaper folk still struggle against being placed at the center of their stories. But we’ve also learned that our audiences don’t fully understand what we do for them or how hard we work to provide the journalism they demand.
Then comes “Spotlight,” the stunning new film that places you in other rooms like that one on our third floor. You are transported into the inner sanctum of The Boston Globe in 2001 as a team of reporters develop and break the Pulitzer Prize story about the Catholic Church’s cover-up of its now familiar pedophilia problem.
I saw it a couple of weeks ago with my wife. I was astonished that other people had paid good money to sit through it. Never before has a film laid bare the work we do so clearly. It’s rich with the details of the ways we talk, work and, sadly, dress.
It was so real that I found myself talking to the screen. “Go doorstop them,” I said aloud when the reporters were frustrated in one of many blind alleys. A few minutes later, the actress playing reporter Sacha Pfeiffer, as if hearing my order, knocks on a door that is promptly slammed in her face. This is what you have to do.
By and by, opaque facts gel into a clear truth, a truth that forever changes Boston and the Catholic world. It ripples still.
As the credits rolled, I sat numb.
The next morning, I posted about the film on my personal Facebook page, saying “Spotlight” provides the most authentic portrayal ever of what actually goes on in a newsroom forging of a big, complex story.
One of my Facebook friends replied: “Yea, those were the days.”
Indeed they were. As you may have read, much has happened to the newspaper industry since 2001, and newsrooms, including ours, have been under immense and growing pressure.
At the same time, investigative reporting is the most difficult and expensive work we do. It would be hard for me to calculate what this newsroom spent between 2008 and early this year exposing the cheating scandal at Atlanta Public Schools and then covering the aftermath of our disclosures. We funded hundreds of reporter hours sifting through records, interviewing, creating and analyzing databases, fact-checking, consulting with lawyers, editing, rewriting, designing and copy editing. (Not to mention navigating a hostile business community, which is to Atlanta what the Catholic Church is to Boston.) What was the opportunity cost of devoting so much money to what was at its core one story about one school system? How do you calculate the ROI?
For me, it’s easy: The story changed the world. It brought attention to the kids who were being cheated by the system. It removed dishonest educators from schools. It led to justice. This is what The Atlanta Journal-Constitution exists to do.
Perhaps predictably, “Spotlight” has generated a lot of hand-wringing about the future of investigative journalism. Margaret Sullivan, The New York Times’ public editor, wrote last week that the film “raises troubling questions about the state of local investigative reporting today and in the future.”
She quoted the familiar litany of concerns about shrinking newsrooms out in those “local” markets – like Atlanta. She cited studies that show newspapers have abandoned statehouses, courthouses and other important mines for investigative digging.
Tom McCarthy, who co-wrote the film, in September expressed more or less the same thing to “Variety,” the trade newspaper. “I’m not sure those who will see the movie will say: ‘Wow! That barely exists anymore.’ They are not going to know that it’s too late,” McCarthy said. “The ice caps have melted. These papers are gone, they’re decimated.”
For the record, we are not decimated at the AJC. Our newsroom isn’t immune from the cold business realities, but we produce more and better investigative work than I’ve seen in my 35 years here.
Why? Because we are committed to it. My boss Kevin Riley is committed to it. His bosses are committed to it. Most important, you expect it from us.
We have two teams of investigative reporters capable of the work you saw in “Spotlight.” We have the capacity to analyze data in ways that the “Spotlight” team could only have dreamed of. We wake up every morning knowing that this work must be sustained because it is central to America’s experiment with self-government.
While I doubt Ms Sullivan can see us from her perch in Manhattan, this “local” newsroom produced scores of significant investigative pieces this year — more than I can list here. Elsewhere, there may be much to lament, but Atlantans who value this work still have much to celebrate.
From that third-floor meeting room, I could detect no icecaps melting.
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