Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Michael Rezendes, whose reports helped expose rampant child sexual abuse by priests of the Catholic Church, spoke to The Quint on how the digital age is impacting investigative journalism and the print media.
Rezendes is part of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team and was portrayed by actor Mark Ruffalo in the Oscar-winning film Spotlight. He was recently in New Delhi for a speaking engagement at The Media Rumble.
The Double-Edged Sword of Digital Journalism
The Quint: How do you think the advent of the digital medium has affected investigative journalism, especially now that more and more print publications are moving to ‘digital only’? Is it helping or hindering investigative journalism?
Michael Rezendes: I think it’s helped in a lot of ways. Because of the internet age, I have a lot of investigative tools. For instance, it’s a lot easier to find people than it used to be. I have a lot of access to data that I never had before. But I think the problem with the digital era is that it has destroyed the revenue model for a lot of news organisations. The internet has helped reporters, but it’s really destroyed the revenue model for publishers in a lot of ways. So it’s a double-edged sword.
The Quint: If your story on clergymen of the Catholic Church sexually assaulting children had come out today, you’d have been flooded with tweets and Facebook posts of people coming out with experiences of their own. How do you think things would have been different had your story been published in 2017 instead of 2002?
Rezendes: I think you’re right. I’d probably be using Twitter and Facebook to contact victims of clergy sex abuse. I think we’d have collected a lot more stories a lot faster, no question about it. Facebook and Twitter are reporting tools that we didn’t have before, and I think they really help investigative journalists in a lot of ways.
Fake News and the Crisis of Credibility
The Quint: How do news organisations guard themselves against the increasing prevalence of fake news?
Rezendes: You have to make sure that you don’t publish anything unless it’s accurate. That’s the responsibility of every journalist, you don’t publish anything unless you know it to be true. As news organisations, we have to do our jobs and get people used to the idea that there are certain websites that they can depend on for the facts and others on which they can’t. We have to provide people with reliable, verifiable information over and over again till they understand that this is the website, this is the news organisation, that they can rely on to go to.
Catch the full interview here.
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