Jaweed Kaleem

Jaweed Kaleem is a national correspondent at the Los Angeles Times. Based in L.A. with a focus on issues outside of California, he has traveled to dozens of states to cover news and deeply reported features on the complexity of the American experience. His articles frequently explore race, religion, politics, social debates and polarized society.

Kaleem was formerly based in London, where he was a lead news writer on Russia’s war on Ukraine, the death of Queen Elizabeth II and political crisis in the United Kingdom. In Europe, he launched The Times’ award-winning Global California initiative with coverage of American migrants in Portugal, Hollywood in the Baltics and the Nordic quest to win over U.S. video gaming.

Kaleem’s dispatches from the U.S. include a road trip from California to Oklahoma to tell the story of Sikh truckers on the “Punjabi American highway,” a year-long investigation into how COVID-19 devastated refugees working in one of the nation’s largest pork factories in Sioux Falls, S.D., and narratives exploring race, the 2020 election and the pandemic across America.

His work has received first-place citations from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society for Features Journalism, the Asian American Journalists Assn., the South Asian Journalists Assn., the National Headliner Awards, the American Academy of Religion, the Excellence in Financial Journalism Awards and the L.A. Press Club’s Southern California Journalism Awards.

Before joining The Times, Kaleem was a religion reporter and editor at HuffPost 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. Raised by Pakistani immigrants, he attended Emerson College in Boston and grew up in Northern Virginia.