Spotlight, COM and the future of investigative journalism

Following the 50th anniversary of the Spotlight investigative team, former Boston Globe journalists and COM educators talk about the importance of in-depth local reporting

COM journalism professors Mitch Zuckoff (left) and Dick Lehr, now reminisce about their work for the Boston Globe's Spotlight team. Photo: Guramar Lepiarz/COM.

November 17, 2021
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Spotlight, COM and the future of investigative journalism

Decades before the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize–winning series on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, the newspaper’s Spotlight team was establishing itself as a local institution. Founded in 1970 to take on deeper investigations than the newsroom could handle, the team uncovered corruption in Somerville and linked cancer deaths to radiation at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. They exposed gangster Whitey Bulger as an FBI informant. They won Pulitzer Prizes. Then came the series on abuse in the Church—approximately 600 stories over the course of 2002—that brought international attention to the elite investigative team and inspired the 2015 film Spotlight.

Since its founding 51 years ago, Spotlight has maintained a close connection with BU. Gerry O’Neill (’70) and Steve Kurkjian (CAS’66) were founding members who would both become Spotlight editors. Joan Vennochi (’75), now a Globe columnist, began her career as a Spotlight researcher. Michael Rezendes (CAS’78) and Sacha Pfeiffer (MET’94, Wheelock’12) reported on clergy abuse. John Tlumacki (DGE’76, COM’78) secretly photographed Bulger and his associates. Spotlight members have also found their way to COM later in their careers. Kurkjian returned to BU as an adjunct journalism professor. Dick Lehr, who cowrote Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI and a Devil’s Deal with O’Neill, is a professor of journalism and Mitch Zuckoff is the Sumner M. Redstone Professor in Narrative Studies. 

COMtalk spoke with Kurkjian, Lehr and Zuckoff about Spotlight, journalism education and the need for more investigative teams.

Q&A

What makes Spotlight special?

Steve Kurkjian: Spotlight gets at why something happened. The who, what, when and how—that’s in every story. But the why is digging deep. It’s the systemic cause. What the Globe gave to us was the time and the resources.
 
Mitch Zuckoff: It’s the hardest kind of journalism to do: You’re always calling somebody out, you’re always casting stones. If you’re not, you’re not doing a Spotlight piece. And those stories have to be bulletproof. They have to be reported down to the last detail and written incredibly carefully. The responsibility of doing that work is the highest form of journalism.

The business side of journalism has become a lot more challenging since Spotlight launched in the 1970s. Does that threaten this kind of work? 

Zuckoff: Absolutely. The Globe is an exception among big organizations, choosing to devote these kinds of enormous resources for months of multiple people’s work, where we don’t know if we’re going to have an outcome. For many years, there was a rise of mini Spotlight teams all around the country but most organizations can’t do that kind of work anymore. 

Dick Lehr: But I also think organizations that have stayed committed to these kinds of teams have been able to monetize them. You can get the news just about anywhere, anytime. But if you subscribe to the Globe or the New York Times, you’re going to get the special reports, the special projects, that you can’t get anywhere else.

What lessons did you bring from Spotlight to your teaching?

Kurkjian: Try to be as direct and honest as possible. Try to always make sure you come away with all your questions asked—and also that you feel good about what you’re doing. If I was working on a story about, say, the MBTA, we always had the sense that our work was going to improve service. I always liked to feel that a story was going to help the community, and that’s a feeling that I tried to impart to the kids. There’s nobody else doing this kind of work in society, no one else challenging the system but your local newspaper and your local reporter.

Zuckoff: I agree with that. I also brought in some of the practical lessons that I learned. My more advanced students are writing weekly memos. The idea is to constantly be reducing your work to a manageable form, because on big Spotlight-level projects, it can get away from you. Another concept that I apply is defining the universe. During my time on Spotlight, we went after the public retirement system—guys who were gaming the system by getting disability, pensions and then going back to work while still collecting pensions. So, what is the disability system? How does it work? Who are the players? If you’re just looking at it from one angle, you don’t know what you’re looking at.

Lehr: There are the values and fundamentals of journalism, but also the wide-ranging projects that have provided fodder as case studies of sorts. Those projects provide countless examples to illustrate points, and not just successes but also mistakes made along the way in the reporting or interviewing. Real-world examples have proven so useful in the classroom.

What advice do you give to students or young journalists who aspire to do this sort of work?

Zuckoff: Spotlight is a mindset. It’s approaching every story with an investigative bent. You can decide you are a Spotlight reporter without ever being on the team. It’s taking the attitude of, “OK, I have to do this story today—but what’s the why underneath?” I’m constantly pressing that on students. You can be working for the smallest website and still understand that you’re part of that tradition. 

Lehr: The best advice I can think of is to work hard gaining experience in basic reporting and writing, with an eye for longer projects, and to not rush. There are no shortcuts, and lots of grunt work and basic reporting skills have to be honed in order to work effectively on bigger projects.

What’s your outlook for investigative journalism?

Zuckoff: The bad news is the weakening of smaller newspapers and the weakening of the watchdogs in communities. There are some really good studies that show a drop in voting and a rise in corruption. But the good news is that I believe investigative reporting sells. It is being prized more today than it ever has. You see the resources that places like the Globe, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post put into investigative teams because people recognize it’s more important than ever, is more valued by readers. So the good news is it’s happening at that top level. What we need to see are more places like Report for America that are focused on building up the tools and the resources at that smaller level—so some little city councilor in who-knows-where doesn’t think, “I can get away with this.” 

Lehr: The outlook on the big stage seems to be OK, between outlets like the New York Times and the Globe, and especially in the rise of the nonprofits like the Marshall Project and ProPublica—they all invest heavily in investigative reporting. Of more concern are the mid-to-small markets. But even there you have regional nonprofits growing to practice accountability journalism.

We can’t not talk about the film Spotlight. What was it like for you to see journalism—and your former team in particular—portrayed in a Hollywood film?

Zuckoff: One of the great things about the movie was the depiction of journalists as heroes. We see so many popular depictions of journalists as jackals. How many movies can we list off the top of our head where the reporter does something unethical or the reporter is kind of sleazy or the reporter is depicted as insensitive, throwing a microphone in the face of a grieving parent? The only good depiction of a reporter is Superman, but even Clark Kent is neutered until he takes off his reporting outfit. Here you had a team of people who were supermen and superwomen, in their normal khakis and ill-fitting blazers. That was such a joy because that’s how I have always viewed reporters and the work of journalism. 

This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.