In 2001, the Boston Globe's new editor-in-chief is Marty Baron, a Jewish media exec coming in from Miami to take over the reins of a paper that has always catered to a predominantly Catholic community and readership, but one on the cusp of primarily getting their news through their AOL connection and the World Wide Web. Baron's first order of business is in getting to the guts of what the paper does and try to make it relevant to the readers they serve, and, in a conversation with Walter "Robby" Robinson, who leads a four-person investigative squad known as "Spotlight", he persuades them to put their current story on hold and dive headfirst into getting to the root of a story about a priest who has been accused of several instances of molestation in the Boston community he serves, as it seems he has had a pattern of doing this wherever the Catholic Church has placed him, only for the story to be mostly buried and see him re-emerge in another community some time later. With the Church having such strong influence in the town, Robinson knows they're going to face strong opposition wherever they dig, but the more resistance they get, the more they become convinced that the problem isn't just one priest, or several -- it's an entire system within the Church that systematically keeps the stories under wraps for fear of shining a light on the many disturbing criminal acts within from individual serial perpetrators, as well as the environment of cover-ups that allows them to operate, seemingly without impunity.