Los Angeles Times: Jaweed Kaleem joins Metro’s education team; Brittny Mejia moves to courts, Colleen Shalby to transportation

The following announcement is sent on behalf of Deputy Managing Editor Maria L. La Ganga:

We’re pleased to announce three key changes in reporting roles that will bolster coverage of education, courts and transportation, critical topics for our readers.

Jaweed Kaleem has joined the education team and will initially focus on exploring the intersection of America’s culture wars in K-12 systems and higher education. His considerable experience on the National and Foreign staff and his award-winning storytelling skills will strengthen our education coverage at a time when the country’s polarizing topics of race, politics and LGBTQ+ issues are crashing through schoolyard and college campus gates.

Before joining The Times in 2016, Kaleem was a religion reporter and editor at the Huffington Post and a reporter at the Miami Herald, where he was a member of a Pulitzer Prize finalist team recognized for coverage of Haiti. A longtime fan of the religion beat, he is a former vice president of the Religion News Assn. and the Religion News Foundation and was a fellow in religion reporting at the East-West Center and the International Center for Journalists.

If you’ve noticed an uptick in thrilling true-crime sagas gracing the Los Angeles Times, then you may have figured out that Brittny Mejia has taken over the federal courts beat. It’s both a critical area of coverage and a trove of amazing stories. We look forward to watching Mejia find tales both important and fascinating.

Mejia joined The Times in 2014 and is best known for narrative pieces with a strong emphasis on the Latino community and deeply reported accountability stories. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2021 in local reporting for her investigation with colleague Jack Dolan, which exposed failures in Los Angeles County’s safety-net healthcare system that resulted in months-long wait times for patients; some died before getting appointments with medical specialists.

Colleen Shalby is also moving to a new role, covering transportation. She will join Rachel Uranga on one of the most dynamic beats in the region, where local and state agencies are spending tens of billions of dollars to vastly expand public transit, upgrade the busiest seaports in the nation and finish the $30-billion overhaul of LAX — much of this in the ramp-up to the 2028 Olympics. Shalby will cover LAX, the state high-speed rail project and the sea ports, among other topics, using the investigative eye she developed over the last two years uncovering cases of sexual misconduct and retaliation in the California State University system and officials’ failure to protect students and employees.

Before working with the investigative team, Shalby covered breaking news, politics, the pandemic and education and was part of the team that was a 2020 Pulitzer Prize finalist for coverage of the Conception dive boat fire. She joined The Times, her hometown paper, in 2015 and previously worked for PBS NewsHour in Washington, D.C.