SUZAN DELIBASIC,
technology editor
Unlike many films about journalism, Spotlight accurately depicts the rollercoaster of emotions experienced when breaking a big story, from sorting through mountains of documents to the thrill of uncovering revelatory information.
After winning this year’s Best Picture at the 88th Academy Awards, Spotlight set Twitter alight as news reporters around the world responded to the producers’ call for more investigative journalism, and urged readers to subscribe to their local newspapers.
The Boston Globe’s current Editor at Large Walter Robinson – who led the 2001-02 Spotlight team’s investigation into the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal – said the public was losing out on a lot of important stories.
“There are fewer reporters walking around with really good investigative ideas because they are made to spend much more time covering daily stories and having to do social media,” Mr Robinson said.
He said the investigative reporting team at the Globe was larger than the one he led in 2001-02.
“However, every paper that I know of is doing much less investigative reporting than 10 years ago because there aren’t the resources,” he said.
Mr Robinson said he thought too much attention was being focused on social media.
“At the same time technology has undermined our economic model and the internet has made it possible to do investigative reporting more quickly and more efficiently," he said.
“So, it’s a double-edged sword because we have far fewer resources, but the reporters who are left are more resourceful.
“They can get information quicker and more reliably and often more accurately because there’s so much good data available right at your keyboard,” he said.
Mr Robinson said in the next few years most newspapers, including the Boston Globe, would not be printing seven days a week.
“Already, our Saturday paper, which is the smallest circulation paper of the week, has combined the front and the metro sections to make it smaller,” he said.
“I know in Boston just the salaries of the printers, mailers and truck drivers are almost $50 million a year.
“That’s a huge expense when your revenue is down. We used to do $750 million in revenue a year and we’re down to about $350 million.”
He said editors around the United States and in other countries had cut investigative reporting first when it came to cutting resources.
“I think that’s foolish because that’s why we’re losing readers because most of the other things we’ve published the readers can get somewhere else," he said.
“We focus too much attention on the daily news which you can get from 40 to 50 different news websites, but you can only get the investigative reporting from our team or our newspaper and that’s where we’ve cut the most and to me that’s not smart.”
Mr Robinson said half of the reporting jobs in the United States had disappeared in the past 10 years.
“I find that people in the business are quite glum of the future of journalism but students are not because they see this vast world in front of them where everything’s changing," he said.
“News organisations demand that the reporters they hire are proficient. They have to be multimedia reporters.
“Good editors will always hire good reporters – that’s a constant. So I encourage students to learn how to dig up the best story and if they do that, they’ll always be ahead of everybody else.”
Ben Bradlee Jr, who was a reporter and editor at the Boston Globe for 25 years, worked as the deputy managing editor for Spotlight during the coverage of the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.
Mr Bradlee Jr said newspapers were in a bad way in the US and assumed they were also not healthy in Australia.
“Newspapers are struggling to find an economic model to succeed," he said.
“You’ve got two to three generations that have grown up with the idea that news should be free.
“Most papers, particularly regional papers like the Boston Globe, have failed when they’ve tried to put up a pay wall because they found that people aren’t willing to pay for the news.”
He said he hoped one of the results of the film would be to make editors rethink about investigative reporting and keep at least some reporters working in that area.
“This may require a new paradigm for newspapers that is shifting to the idea of being a paper where you cover everything, to letting some things go and putting more chips on investigative reporting.”
He said there was a major risk if people de-emphasise investigative reporting, especially at a local level.
“Don’t forget the film was based on a local story that became national, then international," he said.
“I have never been involved in a story like this. It was a story of a lifetime. This one struck an enormously emotional cord with people and I think the key difference was that we were able to get the internal church documents which proved that there was a cover-up on a massive scale.
“One of the most important messages of the film is to underscore the importance of investigative journalism in society and in a democracy because that’s one of the most important things that newspapers can do.
“The watchdog will hold institutions accountable. If newspapers aren’t going to do it, then who else will?”
Richard Baker, an award-winning investigative journalist for The Age, said that lack of funding had not affected investigative reporting at The Age.
“The team I’m part of are still well supported by the company to do what we need to do,” Mr Baker said.
“We did a big series on this company Unaoil and put that out about a month ago and the back story to that was four to six months of intensive work with four reporters, two of which were full-time,” he said.
“We had to buy new computers and new software to analyse all the data we’d been given which was at the heart of that story and no one batted an eyelid, which was really good.”
Mr Baker said that on a broader scale, when staff numbers were being cut and the revenues weren't there, it cut the ability of reporters in different rounds to fully investigate stories.
“It’s not just investigative units that do investigative journalism. There’s health, education and social affairs who do some great investigative journalism,” he said.
He said it all came down to revenue: you can only cut so much before the cuts are so deep there's nothing left worth paying attention to.
“The challenge for everyone, particularly those on top of the tree, is to find new revenue models, and no one around the world has been able to find the perfect formula yet,” he said.
“We’ve clearly put our eggs in a digital basket and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the end of the Monday to Friday paper very soon.
“Now, that might shock a lot of people at first, I wasn’t that comfortable with the prospect of decreasing our footprint, but you only have to sit on a train or tram and look at how people are consuming media these days.
“No one has their elbows out reading newspapers anymore, it’s all through screens.”
Newcastle Herald reporter Joanne McCarthy won a Gold Walkley for her coverage of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church, which led to a state inquiry and royal commission.
Ms McCarthy said students should get into regional newspapers , because there was so much investigative work to be done.
“While there are budget cuts going on, students shouldn't disheartened. There will always be jobs around,” she said.
She said having fewer resources created more opportunities within the newsroom.
“Richard Baker, Nick McKenzie and Adele Ferguson have unravelled some great stories over the years, especially when we have been low on resources,” she said.
Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Monash University Bill Birnbauer, who was an investigative journalist, senior reporter and editor for The Age for more than 30 years, said investigative reporters had free rein to probe anywhere, unlike government agencies such as the Auditor-General, the EPA, the ACCC and ASIC.
Mr Birnbauer said investigative reporters could move quickly to scrutinise powerful interests or expose systemic failure under one guiding principle of acting in the public interest.
“That is why watchdog journalism is seen as a key part of democracy, even though it is generally undervalued by the public,” he said.
He said the internet had diminished the business model of mainstream media; we've all seen the jobs lost and other cutbacks.
“However, editors and publishers have reduced staff numbers by cutting artists, photographers, reporters, sub-editors, desk editors but, rather surprisingly and somewhat counter-intuitively, have maintained and in some cases boosted their investigative teams,” he said.
“If you look at the ABC's Four Corners and Background Briefing programs, The Australian, and Fairfax's The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, some magazines, then New Matilda and Crikey, as well as a few expert bloggers and journos like Michael West setting up, I'd say the scene is pretty healthy.
“An increasing number of university journalism programs are led by former senior journalists who have their students producing public interest stories, including Monash's mojonews.com.au which gets thousands of views,” he said.