Movie "Spotlight" is Newspapers Last Highlight Reel

Artists prefer their mediums to end on a high note. It drives home the overall meaning and creates a better experience for the consumer. One of ESPN’s trademarks, their Top 10 Plays of the Week, caps the spectacular, athletically gifted plays with the most challenged. Movies do this too. Could you imagine at the end of “The Godfather” if Michael Corleone were to whip out a honing device and ask Scotty to beam him up? In the media and entertainment industry, how you end the race is more important than how you begin it. And 2015 Best Picture Winner “Spotlight” is the last great moment for newspapers.

Writing on this platform is strange to me. I have no credentials. I did not major in Journalism. I was required to enroll in English Composition and even then I wasn’t taught how to write columns or think pieces. Maybe from reading this you can tell and discern that I am not a professional. But here I am. I am here, expressing this opinion that I have, hoping you, the reader, draw the same value from it as I do. It is not news breaking to say that newspapers are dead. The job outlook for journalism is way below negative. Newspapers have migrated to the online world, pulling their subscribers in from Apple News or wherever you get your information from now. Could newspapers have ever imagined this ending? News no longer held in the hands of the reader but on a hyper-hypnotizing hysteria creating machine?

2015 Academy Award Winner for Best Motion Picture and Original Screenplay is the last great newspaper movie. Many would agree that it is included in the pantheon of “All the President’s Men” and “Network”. The film is centered around a group of investigative journalists assigned to the uncovering of priests in Boston’s archdiocese molesting children. The film takes place in 2003. Just before the internet boom. What the film exceeds at is making journalism equivalent in excitement to a detectives work. That’s actually what these journalists are. At the time, since no one wanted to cuff a priest, these select journalists assumed the role of putting the clues together and ripping off the masks of monsters to reveal exactly who was hiding what and how. And it took them a long time.

Because real news demands real time. News now is non-stop. First is prioritized over fair. Seen is emphasized more that sincerity. How many clicks news gets determines how much green flows in. News no longer discern quality from quantity. Advertisement has become the major player, replacing people with eyeballs that grab hold of the black and white because they are genuinely curious about what’s happening in the world. Everything is rushed. We all have been bombarded to the point where we eat the blow of a major crisis like a toddlers haymaker. Another mega company got hacked? Who hasn’t been? Another school shooting? Eh, as long as it’s not in my town. Our numbness hasn’t stemmed from a lack of empathy, but an overdoes of exposure.