Welcome back to another episode in Northeastern next. Today we have a very special guest in the latest episode of our co-op perspective series. I sat down with Walter V. Robinson, best known for his work with the Boston Globes famous spotlight team, to discuss his co-op journey from student to employer, his thoughts on the state of journalism today, and the impact he had as a distinguished professor of journalism at Northeastern.
Enjoy. Thanks again for being here. This is really exciting for me. This is really exciting for Northeastern, but I do want to start all the way back at the beginning.
What made you want to attend Northeastern in the first place? Well Beth, when I came here, this is probably decades before Northeastern deservedly had a national reputation, it was the University I could afford. I was attracted to the co-op program. I started here in 63, didn't do that well, dropped out for a year, came back, did better my sophomore year, but I lost my student draft deferment.
I ended up in the Army for four years, to include of course a year back then a year and a year. I came back here at the age of 25, got a co-op job as an intern reporter at the Globe. I had had a co-op several years earlier at the Lawrence Eagle Tribune. Back then it was three months of school and three months of co-op, and I managed to work at an awful time job because they always needed help and there was always a 5 p.m.
to 1 a.m. shift available. I managed to make myself part of the wallpaper. When I graduated in 74, I was hired right on the staff.
I remember the manager got it and called me and he said, we've got a staff job for you. That's the good news. The bad news is it's midnight to eight. But I think without the co-op experience, without that opportunity, maybe I'd still be waiting in line hoping to get a job and to go do the math.
I started there as a co-op in January of 72 and it's 2024, so that's 52 years. So and the co-op experience for me and for many others opened a world that I might never have had access to. I went up the ladder so to speak, City of all Bureau, State House Bureau, National Politics, Presidential Campaigns, Washington Correspondent, and I was Middle East correspondent during the first Persian Gulf War. I was posted to Jerusalem just before Iraq invaded Kuwait.
I was that the tiny. I moved back to Boston as a city editor. It was my first editing role and then became a metropolitan editor. I did that for three years and I wore a lot of tread off the tires and then the globe gave me a position of roving national and foreign correspondent.
So I did a fair amount of reporting overseas and then took over the spotlight team for seven years and some of the stuff we did turned out pretty well. Yeah, I say so. Wow. So and I think this is not an overstatement.
None of that would have been possible or could have come about without the column experience. So while co-op at the Boston Globe, I'm just curious, did you want to get sort of the political sphere? Was that like a choice you had or was it just kind of like as you said, you know, there was a midnight to 8 a.m. shift.
Well, I get into politics because in for a couple of reasons, I grew up in a family where my father was a Republican, my mother was a Democrat and we got two papers. So we talked about politics and current events. So I was always interested in in the news. And one thing I learned fairly quickly when I got to the Globe is that virtually all of the senior editors went up the political letter.
So that fit my interests. And that's that's the letter I got on. You mentioned that you won your first investigative journalism award as a co-op while you're a student at Northeastern. What do you remember this?
I'm sure you remember the story. But what was that story? That's really interesting. The story was about boogie joints.
Really? The Commonwealth of Massachusetts instituted a lottery who was called the numbers back then. And it was controlled by the mafia. Okay.
And there are all sorts of places you could bet. And one place you could bet I found out is within the Boston Globe. There were actually trades guys who took that. But I was actually in school at the time.
And one of the senior editors who was a bit of a mentor for me. And by the way, also a Northeastern co-op grad. Oh, no way. Jack Drissville, he took an interest in me.
And this opportunity came up. They needed an extra reporter on this investigation. And he asked me if I'd be willing to do it. And of course, I couldn't say no to that.
The reporting involved going into these barrooms with another reporter at noon or one o'clock every day, you know, drinking out long that noontime, which is not something I would normally do. And placing bets and you know, recording the fact that it was so called illegal gambling going on. What that made that story so interesting is that in our reporting, we found there were a fair number of Boston cops, the other way, all of those experiences would without co-op. Yeah, I am curious, what kind of skills maybe you developed while on co-op at the Boston Globe that maybe you were able to transfer and sort of develop once you were hired full time.
There are a lot of disciplines where on the job training or co-op gives them a substantial leg up over over their peers who go to other universities. And journalism is an obvious example of that. I mean, you could sit in a classroom forever, but the only way to learn how to do it is to do it. And that's the benefit of co-op.
The globe has, for decades and decades has been a terrific co-op employer and a great place for students to have how you seen the co-op program change and develop since you were a co-op to now being an employer of co-ops. I always went for Northeastern students because most of them had had a prior co-op where they had some experience. Yeah. And that wasn't necessarily true of students at places like Suffolk or Emerson or BU.
And so the Northeastern students, and there's something about the program, specifically the journalism program at Northeastern that attracts kids who really want to do it. They want to do journalism and come to Northeastern because they know they can get to do it. And those kids are almost always really great hires. There's still a fairly steady stream of kids from Northeastern who come into that newsroom and they get to write stories for the Boston Globe.
They get to buy lines, they learn a lot, and they almost always equip themselves extraordinarily well. When journalism students get their degrees most places, not Northeastern, but most places. And they go to interview for a job. The first question any hiring editor will ask, well, let me see your clips.
And they don't have them. But when a Northeastern student graduate applies and they say, let me see your clips, they've got a gag full. Yeah. And, you know, more likely than not, the first job out of Northeastern is that probably a small daily paper somewhere, not the globe.
And having clips from the globe is an extraordinary inducement for any editor to hire. Speaking of the foundation of careers, what is the story behind getting tapped on the shoulder to lead the spotlight team? So as a new reporter, you know, you're given kind of stories that you have to dig deep inside the paper and they're short, they're not the most important stories of the day. And I said, you know, even this little story I've been given to do, I can make that better.
I can find out stuff that maybe would elevate the story. And so I started to get these little assignments and I would dig deep and get a much fuller story. And they ended up running the stories on the Metro Front or on page one. So then they started to give me more important stories to do even when I was a colon.
And, and, and I mean, the secret to my success was always to look at a story, particularly stories that are being so called fed to us by people in power and say, you know, what's what's the real story behind this? And then I would go after and I did that for a very long time. And with with a lot of success, I think I had close to 2000 page one stories in my career. Wow.
And but many of those are maybe most of those were stories that that I had to dig out. And sometimes against, you know, pretty substantial odds. So nobody ever called me an investigator reporter. Okay.
And I never thought of myself as an investigator reporter. I thought of myself as a pretty good reporter. But I always tell my students, every good reporter is an investigator reporter, because our job is to dig out the stories that people we covered don't want us to know about. Right.
And, and people who do that are valued in, in any newsroom. So that's how I think the co-op coming in as a, an intern reporter really, I was motivated to, to dig deeper, not only because I wanted to get good stories, but because I wanted to get ahead. Yeah, I think we're with that. With your story about the church and it captures the attention of the American side guys to the point where, you know, you're portrayed in a movie, you're winning the Pulitzer Prize for public service.
I am curious as a journalist, those acknowledgments and those achievements kind of compound on the fact that you told a good story or at the end of the day, is it I made an impact. This was a great story. And I'm very, very happy with what I did. I think it's all of those.
It's all of those things. I mean, it's in any field, it's always great to be recognized to us, the Pulitzer Prize for public service, because of the impact that our stories had on Catholics, not just Catholics, but particularly Catholics everywhere. And on the church, I mean, the church is in its greatest crisis, sits the Reformation and can't seem to get out of it. The thousands of victims who they got some measure of justice.
And I like to think sometimes, maybe because of the journalism, there was some number of children who did not get to me. That's, that's reward enough. Yeah, and you know, the prizes and the movies be damned, knowing that you've done some good that helps people. Yeah, that's the most important thing.
Especially now with like, you know, you have mediums and platforms like podcasts, social media, technology is kind of everywhere. How do you, would you see you take a different approach to it? Journalism has changed. But technology has made it possible.
Number one to get a lot more information much more quickly. I mean, you know, I can give you one example. If I'm trying to trace somebody's property records, it used to be that I had to go spend a day or two in the registry of deeds. Now I can do that same work that would take two days I can do it in 20 minutes.
Across the craft of journalism, there are many, many examples of that where you can get data, really good data to enhance any story that you couldn't get 20 years. Yeah. And journalists nowadays, I think given the changes in the economics of the profession, journalists need to be and most young journalists are more entrepreneurial. Okay.
They typically come out of programs like Northeastern with the kind of multimedia backgrounds that nobody, my generation had. You know, you were either a reporter or you were a photographer. But now you have reporters who know how to do audio, you know, how to do video, interesting. They can do photography.
So on any given story, important story nowadays, a reporter can actually get it much quicker. As we mentioned before, you are or you were a distinguished professor of journalism here at Northeastern and you spearheaded the initiative for investigative journalism. What was the inspiration to help you have Northeastern journalism students, that sort of experience? Well, when I when I agreed to come here, and you know, I had pretty much done everything I wanted to do full time at the globe, the deal was I wouldn't teach students the basics.
I would take I would take the best students in the journalism program, and we would do real investigative stories. That's how they would learn investigative reporting. The globe would run the stories. So this was obviously a win win for Northeastern journalism school, the students who loved the bylines, particularly on page one investigative story, and for the goal.
And so it worked, it worked well for everybody. And the seven years that I taught here, we had 26, page one investigative stories that the students did. That's incredible. I was their editor, sometimes I was tough, have fun on them, but but they they knew what they were doing.
That's incredible. Apparently, because almost all of them had had prior co-ops at the globe and other places where they had actually done reporting. So it wasn't like the first rodeo. Well, I want to take a second and say thank you to Northeastern for making this possible.
And for bringing in students who by the way are hell a lot smarter than I was at their age, kids who want to do this work and are capable of doing it. And they come to an institution that makes it all possible. Thank you so much, Rob.