Matt Carroll spent 26 years as a Boston Globe reporter. He’s spent a year in the ‘spotlight.’
The local reporter was a member of the Globe’s Spotlight Team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for shining a light on the Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandal.
The scandal and the reporting that broke the story wide open was the subject of the 2015 film, Spotlight, which recently won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
“All in all, it’s been a wonderful ride,” Mr. Carroll said, as he addressed members of the BSU community in the council chambers.
Now working for the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he runs the Future of News Initiative, Mr. Carroll spent the first part of his talk discussing his new role and two recent developments, Newspix and Fold.
Newspix is an app that helps journalists draw attention to their online stories by using a stream of large and engaging photos. Each photo links to the relevant story.
Fold is a platform that allows writers to incorporate additional text, links, photos and video into a story that runs alongside the body of their written story.
“This is not traditional,” Mr. Carroll said of Fold. “It’s a place where you break up stories, atomize them, and put them back together. I think this is going to be really popular.”
When the talk turned to his experience being portrayed in the film Spotlight, Mr. Carroll began at the start. He recalled how more than a decade ago the producers first approached him and his colleagues about making the film. They didn’t have any money, meaning it would take time to bring the film to fruition.
A lot of time, as it turned out.
In fact, waiting for the cameras to roll, Mr. Carroll often gave up on the idea of there ever being a film. Until finally one day director Tom McCarthy and writer Josh Singer took Mr. Carroll and his colleagues to dinner in the North End and said, “We start filming in a month.”
Mr. Carroll recalled first seeing actor Brian D’Arcy James portray him in an early cut of the film.
“I thought my head was going to implode,” he said. “It was a very, very surreal experience. Kind of crazy…”
Once he got past this, Mr. Carroll said he enjoyed the film and saw its merits. He went on to describe the first time the film was shown to a large audience. It was at the Toronto Film Festival, and it received an eight-minute standing ovation.
The Oscar buzz for the film began that night.
The talk was sponsored by the Marketing and Communications Division and the Communication Studies Department. (Story and photo by John Winters, G ’11, University News & Media)