Spotlight is one of my single favorite movies ever, and I’ve probably seen it a dozen times. I use parts of it to discuss various aspects of the the news business when I'm talking with folks in journalism, because we've almost all seen it, and if you haven't — drop everything! On the flight home from the News Product Alliance Summit in Chicago last week, I queued it up and was inspired to catalog every instance of news technology the team used in the course of the film.
The second scene in the movie is a going away party for a reporter named Stuart, and we get our first glimpse at some news technology — computers, with CRT monitors. We'll see a lot of these as the film proceeds. And when Sacha Pfeiffer and and Matt Carroll walk downstairs with a slice of cake from Stuart's party to give to Mike Rezendes (I love them all, but he’s my favorite), we hear the whir of the printing press.
Walter “Robby” Robinson meets with Marty Baron, and says glumly that “internet is cutting into the classified business” but what he’s more focused on is “making this paper essential to its readers” — still the goal, Marty!
By 22 minutes in, we’re in the newspaper’s library pulling clips — hey, a glimpse of what looks like an early news website! — and printing stories from microfilm.
A priest giving a sermon was on “the “World Wide Web!” Baron visits Cardinal Law. Law has always been fascinated by the newspaper business and sat in on lectures with the Neiman Fellows at Harvard.
Not so much about news products, but one of my favorite exchanges in the movie follows. Cardinal Law says, “I find that the city flourishes when its great institutions work together” to which Baron replies, “Thank you. Personally, I’m of the opinion that for a paper to best perform its function it really needs to stand alone.” Then Law gives Baron a Catechism. (This really happened! The catechism in the movie is the one that the real Law gave the real Baron!)
These journalists are always writing on reporter’s notebooks, which are some of my favorite news conference swag. I have one from WSJ, which makes sense, and also one from Snap, which does not. Their notebooks all look suspiciously new. Sacha’s notebook is miraculously the right size for a walk and talk, but Mike’s looks better on Mitch Garabedian’s conference table. Convenient!
Sacha talks to Joe Crowley a second time on her mobile phone — what looks to be an era-appropriate flip model. Then Mike takes a call on his cordless landline from Richard Sipe.
The camera rapidly pans past someone working on a laptop in the office cafeteria, and then we’re back in the library. Then, in one of my favorite walk-and-talks that advances the plot rapidly takes us through the printing press to a deeper library (the archives!) in the basement. There's a thrum in the background, but the characters aren't yelling, so the press can't be running during this conversation.
Robby and Sacha are again using different sized notebooks in the next interview at MacLeish’s office. Still looking brand new!
We’re now in Ben Bradlee Jr.’s office — or is it Robby’s? — and he has a CRT monitor. Then we get a solid few minutes wining and dining with nary a power cord in sight until Mike has Sipe back on the phone at the office and we get a whole desk full of files, phones, and a bonus stack of floppy disks! As we pan out, we also get a stack of jewel cases, a laser jet printer, and another workstation.
A walk through the newsroom shows the usual CRT screens with very convincing Win32 forms displayed on each, and then we get a full shot of good old Microsoft Excel 98 and the creation of a list of priests and their status in the diocesan directories. Excel: One of the few things that's still a widely used news product. (“Can you print it?” “Sure can!”)
We’re back to shoe leather as the team validates what they found in the data, which, aside from advancing the plot, gives Stanley Tucci more screen time as Mitch Garabedian and a beautiful shot of an AOL Anywhere billboard over the Globe’s squat headquarters in South Boston. Reporters' notebooks: Still a news product. AOL: Not so much, but as recently as 2010, AIM was commonly used. If you knew Matt Drudge's screen name, you could pitch him directly!
At this point the story is interrupted by September 11th, and Marty Baron watching it unfold on a small TV at a reporter’s desk. Mike is on a flip phone in his car in Florida, trading fast news for slow. But we get to mid-October pretty quickly and Mike is running around Boston again. He pays a court clerk $83 to photocopy the long-awaited records and rushes back to the Globe again. Is an escalator a news product? With Mike Rezendes on it, it sure is!
After an evening of drinking about strong feelings for the story, the church, and the city, we’re back in the Spotlight office again.
At 1:46:30, we get the most serious news product shot we'll get all movie — a CMS, called “My NewsEngin” (wait, this is real?) with a title, “SPECIAL REPORT SPOTLIGHT ARTICLE #! -- GEOGHAN LETTERS ET AL” and the start of a story. Mike is at his laptop, typing furiously. We cut back and between him composing the story and the others wrestling with their own demons. I often use this sequence to illustrate what LLMs can and can't do for journalists. All the prose writing in the entire movie happens in a montage over kids singing "Silent Night." If you added an LLM to Spotlight, the movie would be maybe five seconds shorter.
Finally, at almost the end of the film, we learn that the Globe has a website! They’re going to print the URL of the story at the end of the article. The end of this conversation yields another great line from Baron: “Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we spend most of our time stumbling in the dark. Suddenly a light gets turned on and there’s a fair share of blame to go around.”
Then we see the presses running full speed, for just a second. As a digital news lifer, the whir of the press shouldn’t be so appealing to me, but it never gets old. The news trucks roll out. The team shares early copies with a few others, then heads into the office to answer phones, giving Robby the last line: “Spotlight.”
