Real Change News | Director’s Corner

April 15, 2009
Vol: 16 No: 18

Director's Corner

Director’s Corner

by: Timothy Harris , Executive Director

Our very own Rosette Royale has been nationally honored for his three-part series, “The Man who Stood on the Bridge”

Like it? Share it!

The word is spreading unusually fast this week that Real Change is an uncommonly good newspaper. Our own Rosette Royale won a national Society of Professional Journalists award for last summer’s three part series, The Man On The Bridge, which puts Real Change in the same league as the big dogs over at the New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR (pause for extended applause).

Thank you.

The story of Bret Hugh Winch, a man who, on October 17, 2007, leapt to his death from the Aurora Bridge, grew from a few sentences Rosette saw in our StreetWatch police blotter column. Seven months, more than twenty interviews, and hundreds of pages of public disclosure requests later, Rosette’s 15,000 word profile of system failure ran in three parts. It was, hands down, the best reporting we’ve ever had the honor to publish.

This morning, a reporter asked whether running a feature story that sympathetically portrayed the life of a sex offender was something that ever gave us pause. It’s a good question.

The answer is, basically, no, although it’s something we talked about. One of the core values of Real Change is to meet people where they’re at, and that, at its most profound level, means seeing past the situation to the person. “You cannot,” I said, “reduce a person to their homelessness, their addiction, their illness, or the worst thing they’ve done in their lives.”

The story can be downloaded from the Real Change website at realchangenews.org. Rosette. We’re all proud of you. And, please, when the New Yorker calls, tell them you already have a job.

----