A news reporter in Edmonton has spent years investigating how one of her stories ended up printed on a scarf from China, and has yet to solve the mystery.
Jana Pruden, a feature writer for The Globe and Mail, noticed the scarf covered with a newsprint design while walking through a fashion trade show in 2016. As she took a quick glance at the scarf, Pruden noticed one of the stories was her own: a report about mad cow disease from five years prior.
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“I literally just flicked it and I saw my name,” Pruden told CTV Edmonton. “I don't know how I saw that, but that's what I saw and I recognized it."
The scarf even has her byline printed on it.
Pruden bought the scarf and began looking into who created the garment, where it came from and how the designers chose her story.
“Basically, it was like a forensic analysis of everything on the scarf,” she said.
The scarf has a tag for an American brand, which she tracked down to a New York-based importer. The company told her it buys their products from several cities in China and would not be able to narrow down its originator.
Pruden then began investigating the other stories on the scarf to check for any similarities. Of the 13 articles on the garment, she’s been able to track down nine. The stories come from five different countries across more than 100 years of news and without a common theme.
“A lot of them were actually extremely difficult to track down and took possibly a disproportionate amount of reporting effort to what I gained in the end,” she said.
Pruden’s working theory surrounds China’s recycling industry. Before 2018, China accepted a lot of the world’s discarded newspapers.
Pruden thinks whoever designed the scarf might have simply picked pages from the recycling pile and selected the articles to fit the garment, which would explain the random nature of the articles.
“There's the potential that there's some big recycling depot and there's piles of papers dating back that far,” she said.
Still, Pruden is most baffled by the astronomical chances of finding a scarf that used one of her articles, seemingly at random, then finding it at a trade show in Canada, thousands of kilometres from where it was designed.
“It kind of breaks your brain, a little bit, when you think about: ‘How could that possibly happen?’” she said.
