Jim Romenesko has posted a letter from my friend Susan Ryan-Vollmar on the Boston Phoenix’s groundbreaking work in exposing the pedophile-priest story, and on the Boston Globe’s ongoing silence about the Phoenix’s coverage, which predated the Globe’s by nearly a year.
I think Susan, a former Phoenix news editor, gets it fundamentally right. The Globe got the documents that led to Cardinal Bernard Law’s departure. The Globe richly deserved the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service that it won in 2003. But I agree with Susan that Kristen Lombardi’s reporting for the Phoenix warrants more public recogntion than it has received.
Susan, Kristen (currently a Nieman Fellow) and I all worked at the Phoenix together and remain friends. I consider Kristen to be the finest reporter I ever worked with. Susan is a first-rate editor who did much to shape and focus Kristen’s stories. Walter Robinson, who was the Globe Spotlight team editor that covered the priest scandal, is now a valued colleague at Northeastern.
But Susan has laid down the gauntlet, and Romenesko has asked Globe editor Marty Baron to respond. This bears watching.
Tags: Boston Globe, Boston Phoenix, Kristen Lombardi, Nieman Foundation, pedophile, Pulitzer Prize, Pulitzers, Romenesko, Susan Ryan-Vollmar, Walter Robinson
Media | Dan Kennedy | 
January 4, 2012 10:23 am | 
Comments (3)
Kristen Lombardi
Congratulations to my friend and former Boston Phoenix colleague Kristen Lombardi, who will be a fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation in 2011-’12. FOKs have known for a few weeks, but today Nieman made it official. It looks like an impressive group.
Kristen is a dogged investigative reporter, the best I worked with. While at the Phoenix, she broke several important parts of the pedophile-priest story months before the Boston Globe began its Pulitzer Prize-winning work. I’m proud to say I worked at the Phoenix during the Kristen Lombardi era.
For the past few years she’s been at the Center for Public Integrity, where she recently won a Dart Award for her reporting on sexual assault on college and university campuses.
My former Boston Phoenix colleague Kristen Lombardi is the lead reporter in a series on how college and university administrators respond to allegations of sexual assault. Published by the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit investigative-reporting project, the series is the product of months of work and scores of interviews.
Lombardi reports that when law enforcement declines to step in because of insufficient evidence, conflicting stories and the like, colleges are mandated under federal law to investigate. Yet victims and alleged victims encounter a frustrating atmosphere of secrecy and of administrators who don’t always take them seriously. Lombardi writes:
College administrators bristle at the idea they’re shielding rapes. But they admit they’ve wrestled with confidentiality in campus assault proceedings because of FERPA and the Clery Act [federal laws that mandate privacy]. Confusion over the laws has reinforced what critics see as a culture of silence that casts doubt on the credibility of the process. “People will think we’re running star chambers,” says Don Gehring, founder of the Association for Student Conduct Administration, referring to secret, arbitrary courts in old England. “And that’s what’s happening now.”
The series, “Sexual Assault on Campus: A Frustrating Search for Justice,” is a vivid example of investigative journalism’s migration to online, non-profit organizations. And, as is more and more often the case with such projects, it comes complete with multimedia, additional resources and an extensive “Reporter’s Toolkit” to help news organizations follow up on the work produced by Lombardi and her fellow journalists.
Last week, Lombardi discussed her report on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.”
