Jaeah is an independent journalist and a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. She has written for California Sunday Magazine, The Economist’s 1843, Columbia Journalism Review, Topic Stories, Vice News, Pop-Up Magazine, and other publications. In 2018 she was awarded the American Mosaic Journalism Prize for excellence in longform, narrative, or deep reporting on underrepresented groups in the American landscape. “After the Shooting,” a story she wrote about a mother whose son was killed by police, won the 2018 PEN America Los Angeles Literary Award for Journalism. In 2019 she was awarded the Debra E. Bernhardt Labor Journalism Prize for her piece about the declining livelihood of Disneyland’s workers. She is a 2021-2022 Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellow.
Jaeah was previously a staff reporter at Mother Jones, where she covered policing after Ferguson. She was also a reporter-producer on the magazine’s data and graphics desk, where her work earned recognition from the Online News Association, Society of Professional Journalists, National Magazine Awards, and Data Journalism Awards. Her reporting has received support from Type Investigations, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Images and Voices of Hope, and the Middlebury College Environmental Journalism Fellowship.
From 2016 through 2020, Jaeah served on the board of the Asian American Journalists Association’s Bay Area chapter, where she helped launch Hella Asian, an evening featuring local AAPI journalists and storytellers to share their work on stage. Jaeah has spoken at journalism classes and conferences including Investigative Reporters and Editors, Asian American Journalists Association, National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, and Exceptional Women in Publishing. In a former life, she researched and wrote about China at the Council on Foreign Relations.