Among the new reporters for Al Jazeera America’s 12 U.S. news bureaus are several with public media backgrounds.
The New York City–based AJA announced the bureaus and personnel today in anticipation of the network’s Aug. 20 launch.
Ash-har Quraishi will be AJA’s Chicago correspondent. Quraishi has reported for WTTW’s Chicago Tonight since 2011. Previously, he divided his reporting time between that program and the Chicago News Cooperative, the nonprofit newsroom that closed in February 2012. Quraishi won a regional Murrow Award for investigative journalism.
Jennifer London will report for the network from Los Angeles. London was a correspondent on KCET’s SoCal Connected from September 2011 through March 2013. In 2012 she won several honors, including a duPont-Columbia Award, for her story “Courting Disaster,” which exposed an economic crisis at the Los Angeles Superior Court.
Robert Ray will file from the New Orleans bureau. Most recently, Ray reported across platforms for The Associated Press. Previously he was an executive producer, videographer, editor and writer for Inside Chicago at WTTW.
AJA’s correspondent in Washington, D.C., will be Libby Casey. She spent the past year as a host and producer for C-SPAN’s Washington Journal. Her prior positions included working as Washington correspondent for the Alaska Public Radio Network and as a reporter and producer for KUAC in Fairbanks.
Other bureaus will be in Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Miami, Nashville, New York, San Francisco and Seattle.
In January, Al Jazeera Media Network announced that it had purchased Current TV to relaunch as Al Jazeera America. AJA is a sister network to Al Jazeera English and the Arabic-language Al Jazeera, both 24-hour news channels headquartered in Doha, Qatar.