BERLIN – When Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of Axel Springer, and a handful of his top managers first set their sights on the United States three years ago, it was with notebooks in hand, rather than checkbooks.

A decade after taking the helm in 2002, Mr. Döpfner had already made significant strides in revamping Germany’s largest print publishing group for the digital age. The combined online audience of its flagship newspapers, Bild and Die Welt, had become one of the largest in Europe, and the group was investing heavily in digital companies, which were generating an increasing share of revenues profits.

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This is the first of two parts exploring the threatened state of local investigative reporting.

In the recently released movie, “Spotlight,” an investigative reporter for The Boston Globe, Sacha Pfeiffer, grinds away at her job. She gets doors slammed in her face in working-class neighborhoods, she cajoles sources in coffee shops, and she pores over phone directories until the library lights are about to dim.

Her colleagues on the Globe’s investigative team, known as Spotlight, put in their own long hours. The reporter Michael Rezendes (played with manic, twitchy verve by Mark Ruffalo) hangs around courthouses and lawyer’s offices, digging out information through sheer persistence.

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