
A Spreadsheet’s Star Turn - danso
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601545/a-spreadsheets-star-turn/
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walterbell
John Oliver's recent show on "Journalism" included references to the Spotlight
movie:
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=bq2_wSsDwkQ](https://youtube.com/watch?v=bq2_wSsDwkQ)

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frik
Interesting. The movie is great, and the true story very sad.

Let's hope at least Boston Globe has a backup of the spreadsheets and other
original research documents. I wonder why a former journalist and current
research scientist has no proper personal backup strategy.

~~~
danso
Data/notes retention in journalism has not historically been a natural part of
the workflow. Sometimes it's because of logistical reasons, as it appears to
be in this case. But there's also the (IMO, justified) mentality that keeping
notes for long past stories and interviews can put your sources at risk of
being subpoenaed.

How I've heard it explained by various media lawyers is that juries and judges
are not pleased when a journalist doesn't destroy notes on a regular basis,
but happens to do so in just the specific case that the journalist happens to
be under scrutiny for. I guess the technophile equivalent would be using Tor
regularly so that if someday you're accused of impropriety in a specific
situation, you can't be accused of using Tor that one time to hide your
alleged malfeasance.

Again, having a get-rid-of-notes mentality doesn't seem to be the problem
here. Just lack of workflow and practice in keeping information around -- in
an era before cloud file backup and services such as Github, keeping track of
backups on floppies/zip disks/CDs was non-trivial for most people.

If you watched the movie "Spotlight", there's a powerful scene in which the
reporters rips a lawyer (Billy Crudup's character) for covering up for the
Catholic Church because his willingness to settle the abuse cases privately,
and he rips them right back:

> _Years ago, after the Porter case. I got plenty of calls, I had 20 priests
> in Boston alone but I couldn 't go after them without the press. So I sent
> you guys a list of names. And you buried it...Check your goddammn clips,
> Robby_

(The real-life lawyer posted a lengthy Facebook post in which he elaborated on
his role and critiqued the way the movie made him complicit in the cover-up:
[https://www.facebook.com/eric.macleish/posts/922406084502403](https://www.facebook.com/eric.macleish/posts/922406084502403))

I don't know enough about the people in the real-life case, but it sounds like
the reporters on the Spotlight team were unaware of what their colleagues had
known and published in the past, or else they would've been less dickish
towards the lawyer. Malicious cover-up from the top of the Boston Globe's
editorial chain (before the Marty Baron days), or just another case of one
hand not knowing what the other is doing, is up to interpretation. This is a
tangent to the topic of why can't people keep better track of their old files,
but it's just an example of how non-trivial the work of information
organization is.

