Interesting. The movie is great, and the true story very sad.
Let's hope at least Boston Globe has a backup of the spreadsheets and other original research documents. I wonder why a former journalist and current research scientist has no proper personal backup strategy.
Data/notes retention in journalism has not historically been a natural part of the workflow. Sometimes it's because of logistical reasons, as it appears to be in this case. But there's also the (IMO, justified) mentality that keeping notes for long past stories and interviews can put your sources at risk of being subpoenaed.
How I've heard it explained by various media lawyers is that juries and judges are not pleased when a journalist doesn't destroy notes on a regular basis, but happens to do so in just the specific case that the journalist happens to be under scrutiny for. I guess the technophile equivalent would be using Tor regularly so that if someday you're accused of impropriety in a specific situation, you can't be accused of using Tor that one time to hide your alleged malfeasance.
Again, having a get-rid-of-notes mentality doesn't seem to be the problem here. Just lack of workflow and practice in keeping information around -- in an era before cloud file backup and services such as Github, keeping track of backups on floppies/zip disks/CDs was non-trivial for most people.
If you watched the movie "Spotlight", there's a powerful scene in which the reporters rips a lawyer (Billy Crudup's character) for covering up for the Catholic Church because his willingness to settle the abuse cases privately, and he rips them right back:
> Years ago, after the Porter case. I got plenty of calls, I had 20 priests in Boston alone but I couldn't go after them without the press. So I sent you guys a list of names. And you buried it...Check your goddammn clips, Robby
I don't know enough about the people in the real-life case, but it sounds like the reporters on the Spotlight team were unaware of what their colleagues had known and published in the past, or else they would've been less dickish towards the lawyer. Malicious cover-up from the top of the Boston Globe's editorial chain (before the Marty Baron days), or just another case of one hand not knowing what the other is doing, is up to interpretation. This is a tangent to the topic of why can't people keep better track of their old files, but it's just an example of how non-trivial the work of information organization is.
