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No sex. No car chases. No guns, blood or gratuitous violence.

“Spotlight,” the story of a relatively tedious long-term investigation by the Boston Globe into sexual abuse of children by dozens of Catholic Church priests in Boston, won this year’s Academy Award for Best Picture. You can imagine the fist-pumping in newsrooms all over the country, including this one. (In fact, we had an added reason; our publisher, Pierre Omidyar, helped bankroll the film and is listed in the credits as an executive producer.)

I was hit by waves of nostalgia, of course. Ah, the good old days when many newsrooms had specialty reporters and I-teams such as the Globe’s Spotlight team. Long hours were spent doing detailed research (much of it in public library reading rooms in the days before the Internet) or meticulously reviewing hundreds if not thousands of pages of documents obtained under public records requests.

In the 1980s we started routinely creating databases as part of a relatively new concept called computer-assisted reporting.

Only after you were pretty sure you knew what you were talking about did the fun work begin: running down reluctant public officials and other sources by waiting for them outside their offices. Or knocking on the door of someone’s house, if that’s what it took, to ask the tough questions.

I was struck by something else about “Spotlight,” too — how much it reminded me of being a journalist in Hawaii. Boston, it seems, can feel like as much of a small town as Honolulu. The reporters and editors were as in awe of the Catholic Church and Cardinal Bernard Law as their mothers and aunts and cousins, who were mortified to find their own sons and daughter actually suggesting that the Church had done something very bad. Talk about island mentality.

And yet, the victims came forward, the journalists did their job and the effort led to the worldwide exposure of sexual abuse and cover-up at the highest levels of the Church. Many people were helped by that work.

Investigative reporting still is important stuff as “Spotlight” so artfully reminded us. The lesson of patience and persistence and even hindsight is not lost on us here at Civil Beat.

In 1993, when becoming an investigative reporter was still very much a dream of many young journalists, a University of Hawaii journalism class took on one of the most powerful institutions on this island — the Honolulu Police Department and its influential union. The students, who wanted to look at police misconduct, challenged the cops in a number of ways, including in court.

The students won the battle but lost the war, as they say. The Hawaii Supreme Court ultimately ruled in their favor. But by then the union had lobbied the Legislature to put a special exemption in the state’s public records law that protects police disciplinary files from public scrutiny.

Investigative reporting still is important stuff as “Spotlight” so artfully reminded us.

In 2013, we picked up where the students left off 20 years earlier. You can read much more about the UH effort and how it informed our work in our investigative series, “In The Name Of The Law.”

It’s taken a few years, some committed lawmakers and a determined effort on our part and theirs to keep the problem of police misconduct in the public consciousness, but much-needed police reform is finally starting to gain some traction in the Hawaii Legislature. Several bills to create better public oversight of police departments are still alive as we near the halfway point in the session.

One result of our investigative reporting was  of what little public information there is about police misconduct at the Honolulu Police Department. We’ve been updating it, and it now contains 16 years of limited but still very telling data about misconduct and disciplinary actions within the HPD. You can read about the original database and how we built it in this story. The database is now easily accessible on our Data Page.

We believe that the media is truly The Fourth Estate, playing a vital role in our democracy, especially as an independent check on the three branches of government.

As “Spotlight” shows, a strong and determined investigative journalism effort can bring about fundamental change and, on a very basic level, speak for people who are otherwise powerless and forgotten.

By the same turn, a weak or lazy media allows terrible wrongs to flourish. The result is too often bad public policy that remains unchallenged for decades until someone — like the UH journalism class — does the basic investigative work that leads, even slowly, to better government.

In Hawaii we have a media where the power to shine a spotlight in dark corners of political and economic power is now concentrated in just a handful of operations, formerly independent voices swallowed up by the same owners.

Now, Oahu Publications controls the Honolulu Star-Advertiser (a merger of what used to be two major metro dailies in Honolulu), the Garden Island on Kauai and West Hawaii Today and the Hawaii-Tribune Herald on the Big Island, along with nearly two dozen smaller community and specialty publications.

Two formerly independent TV news operations consolidated under one owner and a third station contracts for the same news broadcast. Those are all known as Hawaii News Now.

Hawaii has a handful of news magazines, too, but most of those — like Honolulu and Hawaii Business — also operate under a single publisher.

That leaves two TV stations — KITV and KHON — with independent news operations, Hawaii Public Radio, some small online sites. And us.

We think it’s important that the public understand how the media operates and why. And we think given the popularity and success of “Spotlight,” you’re interested in that, too. So this week we are launching a new regular column focused on media literacy and media criticism.

We’re calling it “Reader Rep,” a throwback to the days when a lot of newsrooms could afford a reader rep to field calls and address concerns from the public.

University of Hawaii journalism professor Brett Oppegaard will be exploring the media in a way that should help readers better understand what they are reading and hearing in the Hawaii market. He also plans to discuss media issues and trends aimed at educating you on our business in general.

Brett is a veteran reporter and editor who after decades in the trenches at various newspapers around the country went into academia. He landed here in Hawaii a couple years ago. But in this column he’ll be representing you, the reader, not us, the journalists.

We’ve asked him to pull no punches, including when it comes to Civil Beat. Our journalism is fair game for examination and criticism, the same as anyone else.

“Spotlight” certainly reinvigorated our newsroom and others across the country. We’re hoping it resonated with you as well.