Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist at WSU

Last Tuesday, 30 Weber students were packed into Room 305 of the Weber State University Shepherd Union Building to hear guest speaker and Pulitzer Prize-winner Loretta Tofani speak to students about her "American Imports, Chinese Deaths" article for the Salt Lake Tribune, which won her an award for Utah's SPJ Investigative Reporter of the Year. Sheree Josephsen, representing the local SPJ chapter, introduced Tofani. Tofani earned her bachelor's degree from Fordham University in 1975 and achieved her master's degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkley. Her Pulitzer-winning material was an article about gang rape inside a Maryland jail, written for The Washington Post in 1982.  After writing for The Enquirer for 14 years, and serving as the Beijing Bureau Chief, her Pulitzer-writing days were "becoming a bittersweet memory." She moved to Ogden in 2001 and decided to open a store to sell ethnic Chinese furniture. She imported her goods from China and eight months later she visited one of the factories she was buying from. "I was horrified," Tofani said. "A man was spraying furniture with oil-based benzine lead paint and only wearing a flimsy mask." She eventually went to six other factories and it was the same scenario - the disease changed depending on the product they were working on and the hazards around them.  These products were being made cheap at the cost of the Chinese workers' health. She knew there was a story here. After researching, she found that the Chinese workers' plight was already documented in medical journals, but was in scientific terms and hard to understand. The disease the furniture makers were suffering from was silicosis. Unfortunately, most people already had an idea that Chinese working conditions probably weren't safe, but knowledge about it was vague and no one connected the working conditions to the workers. She said that's when she had an epiphany - she would relate the imported products, to the diseases and injuries the Chinese workers risked while making them. "The first hurdle was getting the shipping records," Tofani said. She soon found out it was not public information and buying the information from PIERS, which is a shipping company that maintains a database of all intertational shipping records, was more than she could afford. She called her store contacts and got access to those documents. She said she called as many leads as possible, despite the uncooperative nature of the people she was dealing with. When she went to Hong Kong and talked to one of the closely-watched labor groups, she arranged a meeting with some women who worked in a Ni-Cad battery factory. They told Tofani that they handled the cadmium powder by hand and they only wore cotton gloves. They ate in the factories so it got in their food, their hair, their eyes and their lungs. These women were getting sick and dying. Some of them were barely in their 20s. The story didn't end there. While talking to them, they provided a long list of other injured factory workers that were in the hospital with them. She talked to another group of factory workers - three men who lost their fingers while working on furniture with unsafe tools. She continued to interview as many as were willing to tell their story. "I threw out the factory stories who didn't export to United States," Tofani said. She explained that this instilled a sense of U.S. responsibility, and invokes a reaction in readers and connects the travesties going in the factories to the products people buy to save money. "It makes investigative reporting look so interesting," said Kenna Mitchel, a WSU student. "I never knew it took so long to do. It makes me want to write more."  David White, a senior at WSU, said he liked her article. "It may change my career path," White said. White said he and his father had been thinking of importing goods from China and starting a dollar store, and Tofani's article changed that idea. "If I start a company that imports goods from China," White said, "I want to see the factory, the workers and the conditions before I buy from them. I don't want to open a package and see an arm in the box." Josephsen said she was happy the students had a chance to listen to Tofani. "When we get high-caliber people, like Loretta, to share their experiences with students," Josephsen said, "it attracts more students to the SPJ community and exposes them to all of the opportunities in the field." During Tofani's speech, she made a step-by-step analysis of how she researched her story and created a model for finding other investigative stories. "The medical journals provided the numbers, I talked to factories about their conditions and then I talked to the businesses about why they imported from these dangerous factories," Tofani said. "It took 14 months to complete the article, five trips to China, provided by the Pulitzer Center Travel Grants. The story is more-or-less known to people." She said the job of a journalist is to find sources to tell a story from, break through the preconceptions people have and connect them to what is really happening.