Ashad Hajela has a penchant for putting himself in uncomfortable situations. After spending the first seven years of his life in the United States, he moved to Pune, India, with his family to be closer to relatives there. When he discovered that most of his peers there were Manchester United fans, he decided to support Chelsea, one of their main rivals.
When Hajela returned to the United States to attend New York University, he signed up for a journalism class because he wanted to get better at engaging with people he didn’t know. “I took my first journalism class because you have to get out of your comfort zone and try to talk to as many people as possible,” he said.
After that initial class, Hajela was hooked. Since graduating in 2019 with a double major in history and journalism, he has charted a path through the industry that has taken him from North Carolina to Pennsylvania to Connecticut, and now back to New York City. He joins the Amsterdam News’ Blacklight unit as an investigative data reporter through ProPublica’s local reporting network.
“We are excited to add Ashad to the Blacklight team,” said Blacklight founder and AmNews Executive Editor Damaso Reyes. “His multi-platform experience and background in data will add tremendous capacity to our ability to help keep our community informed.”
Hajela began his professional career as a breaking news public safety reporter for the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. After reporting on the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, he decided to train his focus on accountability in policing and prison systems. “Covering the George Floyd protests helped inform the way I approached some of that reporting, and made me really critically reflect on police narratives,” he said.
After a few years in North Carolina, Hajela enrolled in Columbia’s journalism graduate school program to hone his investigative skills. Post-graduation, he spent a year reporting in rural Pennsylvania as a Report for America corps member at Spotlight PA.
“I diversified the kinds of things I was reporting on: I covered healthcare, I wrote about tax codes, [and] I wrote about property maintenance and blight in rural Pennsylvania,” he said.
Hajela’s final stop before joining AmNews was at Connecticut Public Radio, where he turned a critical eye on the state’s criminal justice system. “I did a lot of coverage of the juvenile justice system and analyzed a lot of the data that showed huge racial discrepancies in terms of who ends up getting sent to juvenile court, as well as who gets access to some of the resources that are supposed to serve as helpful alternatives to correction,” he said.
Now a member of the Amsterdam News, Hajela wants to use his investigative and data skills to deepen coverage in two of the Blacklight unit’s main topic areas. “The team hopes to cover gun violence and climate change, and those are two issues I’m very keen to do some good reporting on,” he said.
In addition to looking at the intersection of gun violence and healthcare, Hajela is interested in investigating the politics of energy in New York, and scrutinizing policymakers’ disaster preparation plans “as climate change continues to get worse and worse, and natural disasters seem to continue to increase in severity.”
Joining the Amsterdam News also means Hajela will be returning to familiar territory in New York City. He is looking forward to reconnecting with old friends and sources, and spending time with his younger sister, who also lives in the city. When he’s not reporting, he plans to keep up his hobbies, which include playing squash, rock climbing, and karaoke.
“‘Sweet Escape’ [by Gwen Stefani] is my go-to right now, but it changes,” he said. “In a couple of months, I’ll go back to Stick Season [by Noah Kahan].”