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         Spotlight on the Church Newspapers exist so that investigative journalism can take place. It’s how we fulfill the responsibility we have because of our privileges under the First Amendment. —Mike Rezendes, on why he joined the Boston Globe Spotlight Team Xvery new editor likes to make a splash the first day on the job. But Martin Baron’s inaugural Monday morning story meeting at the Boston Globe on July , , would hit with all the force of one of those rare summer hurricanes that sweeps up the Atlantic Coast to hammer New England. The Florida-born Baron—forty-six at the time, and a twenty-five-year newspaper veteran—had held senior editing posts at the Los Angeles Times and New York Times before returning to his native state to serve the last eighteen months as executive editor of the Miami Herald. There, he had been on a fantastic roll. The Herald had won national praise for its aggressive handling of the Florida votecount debacle, in which the presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore teetered on a review of “hanging chads” and other ballot peculiarities. In pursuit of the story, the Herald sponsored its own recount and launched legal challenges, running up a bill of $, for its owner, Knight Ridder. Then, in April, the Herald had received the  Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting, for “balanced and gripping on-the-scene coverage” of the Elian Gonzalez affair. Young Elian’s story had riveted the nation twelve months before, when federal agents seized the boy from his Miami relatives to reunite him with his Cuban father. Along with prizes, Baron’s management of such high-profile work had won him editor-of-the-year recognition from Editor & Publisher. No wonder Baron was atop the list being kept by the Globe’s owner of the last nine years, the New York Times  Company, for the plum assignment of running one of the nation’s premier papers. The Globe, which blanketed New England with a daily circulation of more than four hundred thousand, was also one of America’s most honored publications.The Globe or its staff members had won an extremely respectable total of sixteen Pulitzer Prizes since its first prize in . Despite Baron’s own impressive press clippings, the new editor tended to make a low-key first impression, asking questions rather than calling shots. At sessions like the morning editorial meeting—which Matthew Storin, his predecessor, had established as the standard day-starter—the main order of business was a critique of the morning’s paper and a review of what stories were in the works. And Baron was content to use his first meeting for those purposes. The Globe had been flown down to Baron in Miami for about a month, so he was familiar with some of its running coverage when he first walked through the doors of the paper’s huge brick Morrissey Boulevard complex south of downtown. One continuing story involved the legal case of a defrocked Catholic priest named John J. Geoghan, accused of sexually abusing children years earlier. A court filing that had managed to escape a judge-ordered confidentiality order—and that had been written about in the Globe only after it first appeared in the rival tabloid, the Boston Herald—suggested that Cardinal Bernard F. Law had been involved in keeping Geoghan active in the priesthood for years. The document said that Law had transferred Geoghan to another parish in , after the priest had been accused of molesting young people in his care. While the Geoghan stories were not particularly prominent, two consecutive Sunday pieces by Globe columnist Eileen McNamara caught Baron’s eye in the week before the meeting. They piqued his curiosity both about his new paper and about the Massachusetts court system. McNamara had noted that a Churchrequested seal on the Geoghan case prevented the public from peering “into corners of the Church that the cardinal would prefer to keep forever in shadow.” Baron was somewhat surprised by the response of the assembled editors as he ran down a list of possible stories, and got to the Geoghan case.There wasn’t any followup planned, they said. The paper seemed stumped by the court’s confidentiality order. The editor, however, had just come from a state where so-called Sunshine Laws tended to keep the media from being shut out. “I mentioned that I didn’t know what the laws of Massachusetts are, but in Florida...

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