For more than five decades, Walter V. Robinson — one of four SPJ 2026 Fellows of the Society — has chased stories around the world. He shared one important lesson he has learned: The story is rarely what you think it is when you start reporting it.
For Robinson, who has reported from 33 countries and 48 states, covered four presidential elections and led The Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Spotlight Team investigation into sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, assumptions can be a journalist’s biggest obstacles.
“It’s so easy for us to forget when we embark on a story,” Robinson said. “We usually come to the story with assumptions about what we think the story is.”
The real work, he said, begins when journalists are willing to question those assumptions and follow the reporting wherever it leads.
“Only good reporting will find out,” Robinson said. “And sometimes it will be 180 degrees the opposite way of the direction your story was going to take.”
Walter interviewing then-Vice President George H.W. Bush on Air Force Two. Photo by David Valdez.
That approach guided Robinson from a paperboy to a career that took him from local and state politics to the White House, the Middle East and some of the country’s most consequential investigative journalism.
Robinson said his family in Boston received 22 newspapers at home. Conversations about the news were a regular part of dinner.
He attended Northeastern University, where a six-month co-op at a small daily newspaper in northern Massachusetts gave him his first taste of life in a newsroom.
Robinson entered the newsroom with little experience. He quickly discovered one very important skill missing from his résumé: typing.
“I was terrified,” he said. “I didn’t know anything.”
When he arrived for his interview, the managing editor told him not to fill out the application by hand. Robinson admitted he didn’t know how to type. The editor told him he couldn’t hire him, but Robinson pleaded for a chance. He was eventually hired on the condition that he teach himself to type and pass a test by the end of the week.
He did and the newsroom gave him his start.
Robinson’s career would eventually take him far beyond that small newsroom. He served as a local and state political reporter, national political reporter, White House correspondent, Middle East bureau chief, city editor, metropolitan editor and assistant managing editor for investigations.
But one assignment in Robinson’s 50-year career stands apart. As leader of the Globe’s Spotlight Team, he oversaw the investigation into sexual abuse by Catholic priests and the church’s handling of those allegations.
The reporting won the Globe the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and helped bring international attention to the issue. In the 2015 movie about the investigation, Oscar-nominated actor Michael Keaton played Robinson.
“It continues to have an outsized impact worldwide,” Robinson said. “That’s the story I talk about the most.”
The investigation reflects the reporting philosophy Robinson continues to emphasize to young journalists: skepticism, persistence and a willingness to challenge what they are told.
He draws a distinction between skepticism and cynicism.
“Trust, but verify,” he said, echoing a phrase popularized by former President Ronald Reagan. “When people tell you stuff, you have to go check it out.”
That persistence is especially important when sources push back.
“The difference between good journalists and not good journalists is that good journalists don’t take no for an answer,” Robinson said. “When somebody says no, they find a way.”
Robinson’s career has given him a front-row seat to the changing economics of journalism. He says students should understand the business behind journalism and encourages them to build skills beyond traditional reporting and writing.
“ I wish students knew more about how to be entrepreneurial,” Robinson said.
More than 50 years after he first entered a newsroom, Robinson has no plans to leave journalism behind.
“I can’t imagine doing anything else,” he said. “It’s fun and it’s important and it’s rewarding.”
Today, Robinson sits on the boards of two nonprofit news startups: The New Bedford Light and the Plymouth Independent.
After a career spent reporting on presidents, wars, institutions and communities, Robinson still sees journalism much the same way he did as a young paperboy in Boston: As work worth doing.
“I often pinch myself and wonder, are they actually paying me to do this?” he said. “Tell me any other career you can think of that has those elements. And I’ll go do it.”
Featured image courtesy of the New England First Amendment Coalition.