Audra Burch is leaving the Miami Herald for the New York Times

The bad news: the Miami Herald is losing Audra Burch, one of the paper's most talented journalists. 

The good news: She will remain in Miami  where she will report for the New York Times.

Here's an email Herald bosses sent to the paper's staff:

Staff:

Time to announce some bittersweet news that many of you probably have heard: Audra Burch, our extraordinarily talented enterprise reporter, has accepted a job with the New York Times, writing enterprise stories for the national desk.

Audra came to the Herald in the mid-1990s after stints at the Sun-Sentinel and the Gary Post-Tribune.

At the Herald, she has distinguished herself over and over, starting as a consumer reporter, shifting into features, where she developed a beat covering the American South, including the funeral of Coretta Scott King and the spate of church burnings in Alabama, before migrating to the Metro desk, where she continued to produce journalism of the highest quality, including a sub-beat on veterans.

Her narrative writing talents are legendary. A few highlights include her coverage of the killing of Sherdavia Jenkins, a 9-year-old girl struck by a stray bullet while playing on her doorstep, and a ticktock on the shooting death of NFL star Sean Taylor.

And then there is Innocents Lost. Audra and Carol Marbin Miller collaborated on the project that painstakingly examined 477 deaths of children who perished despite being under the protective umbrella of the Florida Department of Children & Families. The series led to an overhaul of DCF's leadership, new legislation, and won a boatload of prestigious awards, from Harvard's Goldsmith for investigative excellence to the University of California's Selden Ring to Neiman's Worth Bingham Award to the Online News Association's public service prize. The impact of the series is still reverberating.

The good news is that Audra will remain based in South Florida -- and she will be around for a couple more months working with Carol on another project that should be a fitting capstone to her career here.

Please join us in congratulating her.

Mindy, Rick and Casey