Pulitzer Winner Corey G. Johnson on Tampa’s Lead Problem (re-release)

For years, hundreds of workers at the Gopher Resource lead smelting plant in Florida were exposed to dangerous levels of lead in the air. Poisoned, a series from the Tampa Bay Times, in collaboration with FRONTLINE’s Local Journalism Initiative, uncovers the consequences of what happened.

Times reporters Corey G. Johnson, Rebecca Woolington and Eli Murray gained access to thousands of pages of regulatory reports, company documents and employee medical records. In March 2021, Johnson joined FRONTLINE’s executive producer, Raney Aronson-Rath, on The FRONTLINE Dispatch to discuss what the team found in their reporting. We present this re-release of that conversation in the wake of Johnson, Woolington and Murray winning a Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting and a George Polk Award in Local Reporting for the project.

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