Graduate Student Sky Chadde Wins Don Romero Prize

Sky Chadde, BJ '14

Graduate student Sky Chadde, BJ ’14, is the winner of the 2017 Don Romero Prize for outstanding magazine writing.

The Award Recognizes Outstanding Magazine Writing

By Yue Tang

Columbia, Mo. (April 28, 2017) — Missouri School of Journalism graduate student Sky Chadde, BJ ’14, is the winner of the 2017 Don Romero Prize for outstanding magazine writing. He receives a $750 cash award.

The money for this prize is donated by two graduates of the Missouri School of Journalism in honor of Don Romero, a former faculty member, now deceased, who excelled at magazine writing and editing not only in the classroom, but also as a professional before moving to Columbia. The award acknowledges Romero’s contribution to and his encouragement of outstanding magazine journalism.

Chadde submitted three articles to be considered for the prize.

  • A Year Later: McAllen’s Response to the Immigration Crisis” highlights how thousands of women and children from South America crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and found shelter at a Catholic church in McAllen, Texas. For the one-year anniversary of that event, Chadde looked back and examined how the city responded. He also the first reporter to interview the woman who had sparked the city’s response. The story was published in The Monitor.
  • The Cop Watchers: Chasing (and Sometimes Trolling) Police in the Name of Liberty” is about Chadde’s experience with the cop watchers as they patrolled the streets of Arlington, Texas. His information gathering included sitting in the back seat of a cop-watcher car with a police scanner blasting and getting lectured by the driver about the “police state.” On his last night with them, two of Chadde’s main sources were arrested right in front of him, a sequence of events he says he won’t forget any time soon. The story was published in the Dallas Observer in Texas.
  • The Last 911 Call: A Mentally Ill Dallas Man and the Cops Who Saved Him, Until They Didn’t” shares an experience Chadde had at a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas. Chadde ran into the brother of a man whom police had shot seconds after he came to his front door, as body cam video would later show. This was the same summer as Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri. The brother hadn’t given a lengthy interview about the death yet, so Chadde did an in-depth story on what had happened with him. The story was published in the Observer.

Chadde is a master’s student studying investigative reporting. He served a fellowship at the Dallas Observer after earning his bachelor’s degree and then as a reporter at The Monitor before returning to Missouri for graduate school. Chadde plans to graduate in December 2018.

Updated: October 20, 2020

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