Who says freelance writers can’t make a difference? Loretta Tofani has.
On May 8, Tofani received the $25,000 Michael Kelly Award for a series investigating unsafe working conditions in China that she wrote as a freelancer for the Salt Lake Tribune. She was one of four journalists nominated for the prize and the only freelancer.
Tofani previously won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 at The Washington Post and served as The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Asia correspondent based in Beijing. But she’d left writing and opened up a shop in Ogden, Utah, selling Chinese antiques when she traveled to China on a buying trip and encountered the substandard health conditions in Chinese furniture factories.
The visit prompted her to apply for grants to spend 12 months in China documenting how Chinese workers risk their health and sometimes their lives making products for export to the United States and other countries. That investigation became the series, “American Imports, Chinese Deaths”, which the Tribune published in October, 2007.
Tofani writes about how she stumbled onto the story in this article for the Center for Investigative Reporting, which helped fund her research.
The Michael Kelly Awards is a $25,000 prize given by Atlantic Media Co. to honor Kelly, an editor at The Atlantic and National Journal who was killed in Iraq in 2003.
In addition to Tofani, this year’s other nominees include:
Kelly Kennedy, Army Times – for a series on an infantry regiment in Iraq hit hard by casualties.
Joshua Kors, The Nation – for stories on the mis-diagnosis of injured soldiers returning from Iraq, which have already received multiple other awards.
Blake Morrison, Peter Eisler, and Tom Vanden Brook, USA Today – for stories on the Pentagon’s failure to respond to the problem of roadside bombs in Iraq.