Feature/118 pages
Paper Saints
MediumLogline
A diocesan archivist leaks a ledger that maps which parishes buried abuse complaints.
Synopsis
Ruth Keene catalogs a closed archive and finds a ledger of settlements keyed to parish, not to victim. She takes it to a newsroom that has already been warned off the story once. The investigation is the leak, and the leak has her name on the copy stamp.
Comparable titles
Pitch shorthand: Spotlight meets Snowden
- Median budget
- $25M
- Median worldwide gross
- $68M
- Median multiple
- 2.7x
- 3 of 3 comps report both
- Newest comp
- 2019
| Title | Rating | Budget | Gross | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Spotlight 2015 Matched on journalism, church, journalist, investigative journalism The true story of how the Boston Globe uncovered the massive scandal of child molestation and cover-up within the local Catholic Archdiocese, shaking the entire Catholic Church to its core. | 7.8 9k votes | $20M | $99M | 4.9x |
 Snowden 2016 Matched on journalism, whistleblower, investigative journalism CIA employee Edward Snowden leaks thousands of classified documents to the press. | 7.1 5k votes | $40M | $37M | 0.9x |
 A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood 2019 Matched on journalism, journalist, investigative journalism An award-winning cynical journalist, Lloyd Vogel, begrudgingly accepts an assignment to write an Esquire profile piece on the beloved television icon Fred Rogers. After his encounter with Rogers, Vogel's perspective on life is transformed. | 7.0 2k votes | $25M | $68M | 2.7x |
Comps average 7.3 across about 5k TMDB votes. Budgets and grosses are TMDB figures and leave out marketing.
Breakdown
No structured draft on file. A breakdown appears once the writer uploads pages or writes them in Tycoon.
Pages on file
The story takes place in a diocesan archive and the newsroom that agrees to read what she copied. The protagonist is Ruth Keene, an archivist who decides the ledger is a public record. The church kept the complaints in a bound book with no index. Ruth photographs every page and walks them into the newsroom before the lock is changed.
No file attached.
Writer
Mara Ellison
Writes crime, horror, and performance stories. Staff writer on Harbor Desk for three seasons. A TMDB person id on a profile is a claim Tycoon stores. It is not an identity check.
No TMDB person id on the profile.