What it was like to work at a great newspaper: Spotlight

If All the President's Men heralded a new era of journalism and inspiring thousands to join much-romanticized profession,Spotlight (Tim McCarthy) is the swan song, a nostalgic look back to a time not all that long ago - 2001 and 2002 - when newspapers were still hugely influential, were the primary source of information, and boasted robust staffs that generally coddled an elite few on an investigative team, an I-team, that could had virtually all the time and resources needed to pursue a long-term story. Today, the largest papers still have these teams, but mid-sized papers rarely or ever do and none can influence public opinion in the way or yore. Spotlight looks at the Boston Globe Spotlight team in one its greatest moments, the investigation of sexual abuse by Catholic priests and, more significantly (as the new editor Marty Barret cozened), the cover-up by the Church leadership. This movie is dead-on accurate about (virtually) every aspect of newspaper life, style, and methodology; the newsroom looks exactly like the Globe newsroom did then (I'm sure there are fewer staffers there today, sadly), the people look right, their reporting style and lifestyle are exactly correct, and it was a kick to see how different reporting was just 15 years ago as electronic communication was just emerging and email was not yet born. But that's how it was: old stories literally clipped from newspapers and preserved in envelopes and brown folders; photographs printed and file; the main reference sources being old catalogs and directories stored in the library or in the "morgue." The movie gets the pace of reporting perfectly; the misses are minuscule and mostly understandable: e.g., a top editor would rarely if ever stop by a reporter's house at night for pizza and talk (but it's better on film to do it that way rather than a phone call), a reporter would never go on his own to speak to a judge (we used to keep cards in our wallets with procedures for calling the newspaper attorneys on demand), and wouldn't a report and top editor know it's "pickets" not "picketers"? These are quaint quibbles - Spotlight is a great movie that holds your complete attention for two hours and shows you exactly what it was like to work at a great newspaper in its heyday.