Letters to the Editor: A reporter turned her identity theft hell into a valuable public service for readers
As a reporter with the Times Herald and Tribune last year, I took a big risk.
I left a well-paid and secure job at one of America’s most prestigious newspapers to work as a freelancer. I took the risk at a time when the Times was mired in a bitter battle with the Chicago Tribune for control of the Times Herald and Tribune. Many of my friends were leaving their jobs to become freelance reporters and were going into a war of wits with my old boss.
The newsroom was divided. We had a reporter whose life was completely in the public domain, and a reporter who had been “outed” as a former drug user and prostitute, whom no one had ever heard of. He had won the Pulitzer prize for a series of stories from his first day on the job, only to discover later that he had won this Pulitzer for what he had done in the past, not what he did now.
But he was a great reporter. I knew him only as Robert Wright, the reporter from the Times Herald, who spent years on the road, working in the world’s worst neighborhoods as a reporter, and eventually taking a job as a high school history teacher in an inner city neighborhood in Illinois, and then teaching journalism again.
When I joined my brother in the TPT newsroom, the people who had once been on the other side from the one who reported on the news had not forgotten his past, and I had to watch for people who made a point of telling us who they worked for, and what kind of work they did.
The newsroom was divided. We had a reporter whose life was completely in the public domain, and a reporter who had been “outed” as a former drug user and prostitute, whom no one had ever heard of. He had won the Pulitzer prize for a series of stories from his first day on the job, only to discover later that he had won this Pulitzer for what he had done in the past, not what he did now.
He was a great reporter. My brother and I admired him as much as anyone
