Shining the Spotlight on Matt Carroll
A profile of a Pulitzer Prize-winning Dunkin’ Donuts drinking Bostonian, who will be “literally in the last row” of the Oscars tonight.
Since its release on November 6th, “Spotlight,” a movie about the Boston Globe’s 2002 investigation of sex abuse in the Catholic Church, has gathered significant acclaim from the press. After all, it’s not often that actors usually portraying superheroes and suave womanizers shed their spandex suits and Mad Men attire for button downs and a heroism of a more humble kind. Drawing comparisons to the genre classic “All the President’s Men”, tonight it will be one of eight films in the running for “Best Picture” at the Academy Awards.
But behind the glamour of Hollywood lies the unglamorous reality of investigative journalism, an often tedious job requiring a tenacious attitude.
“This is boring as anything, boring as mud!” said Matt Carroll, recalling his first reaction to producers Blye Faust and Nicole Rocklin’s desire to make a film about his team’s work. Carroll, 61, is a former member of the Spotlight team and the self-proclaimed “geek” of the crew. Although his doubts turned out unwarranted, he retains a sense of pleasant surprise towards the film’s success. Played by Brian D’Arcy James in the movie adaptation, his character is unassuming onscreen, described as “a quiet family man with a mournful mustache” in the New Yorker.
In real life, Carroll is far from shy. Perhaps to his convenience, though, this depiction allows him to skip some press events while staying in character. Spectacles around his neck, coffee in Dunkin’ Donuts mug, Carroll is always running somewhere.
He’s wry and humorous, with an accent that emphasizes his no-nonsense speech. Carroll is, in many ways, the quintessential Bostonian: He cheers for the Red Sox, honors his father’s work ethic, and draws out the long “a” in Park Street, where the church he attends every week is located. Raised in the Boston area, he went to school at Northeastern University, worked for the Boston Globe for 26 years, and is now settled in West Roxbury with his wife of 32 years.
Religion was a large part of his large family growing up (Carroll was the oldest of 18 siblings). In addition to attending the local church every Sunday, the children went to Catholic elementary and high schools. His aunt was a nun. “It’s a very common story for Irish kids my age.”
Still, most “Irish kids” didn’t grow up to expose major corruption in the Church, win a Pulitzer Prize for the investigation, and leave the institution subject to ongoing global scrutiny. Although Carroll is a local and a family man, he’s also a persistent reporter. He began writing for the local paper in high school, and temporarily dropped out of Northeastern to start his own local paper, the Post. At the time, “there was this resurgence of starting good community newspapers.” Together with his friend, and funded by his friend’s brother, the two lasted almost a year running every aspect of the paper, from writing articles to delivery. “It was good,” Carroll said. “We just ran out of money.” He jokes that if he’d invested in a house then, he’d be retired by now. “But instead I wasted it all on a newspaper.”
Carroll’s knack for reporting is reflected in the way he speaks: every question that’s handed to him is already being directed into the next one, the bigger finding. His savvy with numbers and spreadsheets led him to become the “database reporter” for the Globe, extracting stories out of records and statistics long before the era of Nate Silver and “Big Data.” It was this ability to extract patterns from data that eventually revealed the systematic coverup of clerical sex abuse cases in Boston.
“We used those databases as the heart of the story, the nut of the story, the hard kernel of truth,” he said. Lead by Carroll’s initial foray, the team discovered a tactic to uncover potential suspects by looking through the Church’s own annual directories. Entries where priests took frequent “sick leaves” followed by relocation turned out to be a very strong signal for abuse coverup. Carroll and his colleagues went through 20 years worth of books, circling names, and typing them into spreadsheets. “[I]t was unbelievably boring, incredibly laborious, and there were a lot of false positives.”
But the tedious work paid off. Upon publication, the story rapidly reached global importance as it echoed in parishes around the world. Eventually, more than 70 priests were uncovered locally using Carroll’s tactic. By the following year, the Archbishop of Boston, former Cardinal Law, was forced to resign. It was by far the most significant story in his career. “This one, it was like riding the back of a tiger, it just took off so fast and so hard, and did not stop for a long, long time.”
By the time Carroll began reporting, he’d already drifted away from Catholicism. But he says that he was and is the only regular church-goer among the team. Speaking candidly about his Catholic upbringing, Carroll doesn’t fixate on the psychology of individuals, only on the failings of the system. Growing up, “everyone knew that there were bad priests, because there’s bad people everywhere, that’s just how it is.” (He never uses the words “child molester,” always “bad priest.”)
Still, Carroll is frank about the emotional toll of reporting so close to home. During the investigation, he discovered that one of the accused priests, John Geoghan, lived around the corner from his home. In a case where truth turned out to be stranger than fiction, this detail is altered in the movie. “They thought it wasn’t believable if it was his picture I put on my fridge,” said Carroll, to warn his children, who were ages 8–14 at the time.
Investigating the story became so stressful that Carroll created an alter ego. Waking up at 5am each day, he wrote fiction under the pseudonym Sean Patrix before facing the demands of the day. The genre? Horror. Carroll published two e-books, “The Druid” and “The Called,” on Smashwords, a free publishing platform. He has not written fiction since. “Eh, I kinda got that bug out.”
Last year, Carroll left his home at the Globe, and for the first time in 30 years, he is no longer a reporter. He misses the newsroom, but the slow change of pace at publications in an unstable digital age left him feeling antsy. “You see, the industry is going through tremendous turmoil and I had some ideas for helping out.” Carroll cites the importance of the Internet in breaking the Spotlight team’s story. “It was the last great enterprise newspaper story, and the first great Internet newspaper story.”
Now, at MIT, he runs the Future of News, an initiative that seeks to use creative technologies to push newsrooms “ahead aggressively” in this era of information overload and undependable income streams. These days, instead of hunting for stories, Carroll hunts for technologies that could make stories, and make them big. Alexis Hope, a former student at the Center for Civic Media, is currently advised by Carroll for her storytelling start-up, FOLD. The publishing platform seeks to make complex ideas easy to understand with virtual, linked index cards.
“He brings decades and decades of hard earned expertise from being on the ground,” said Hope. “He just cares so much about journalism.” She adds that Carroll also provides business insight on how to navigate the news industry in a shifting, virtual landscape. He’s been a keen observer of how the internet impacts storytelling since the early 90s.
So many of Carroll’s concerns boil down to business — specifically, the business of funding news. His hopes for “Spotlight” are that it gives a new emphasis to investigative journalism, particularly that it’s worth paying for. He estimates that team of four, working on the story for five months, cost the Globe a million dollars at the time.
Ultimately, that’s what he wants to come out of his time at MIT, now that he’s made his mark in the field. What’s the next big project for Matt Carroll, now that he’s earned his Pulitzer and his depiction on the silver screen? At this question, he finally parts with his coffee cup. With a hint of a smile, he pounds his fist on the table. “I’d like to be part of the project that saves the news industry across the world by finding a way of minting gold coins for newsrooms.”
An earlier version of this piece was published on FOLD. Read Matt Carroll’s own experience here.
