Joseph Darius Jaafari
Editor | Reporter
I’m the editor-in-chief of LOOKOUT, Arizona’s — and the nation’s — only nonprofit LGBTQ+ news outlet dedicated exclusively to accountability and service journalism. I came into this role after working on investigative teams at the Arizona Republic, Spotlight PA, PA Post/WITF, The Marshall Project, and NationSwell, where I focused on deeply reported stories around prisons, jails, and policing.
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At LOOKOUT, I’ve led our newsroom to eight awards in just two years, including General Excellence in Newswriting from the Arizona Media Association, and multiple honors for our newsletters — among them “Best Newsletter” and “Best Source for LGBTQ News.” My investigative series on prison labor at the Arizona Republic was recognized by the Best of the West awards and was also a finalist for the Silver Gavel Award. That same series won the Al Neuharth Award at the Online News Association Awards.
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While at Spotlight PA and PA Post, my reporting won Keystone Awards for Best Investigation, including a story on how Black Lives Matter marchers were shot at in Bedford County, where the local district attorney declined to prosecute the shooters and instead charged the marchers. My work there also led then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro to launch an investigation into state police stop-and-frisk practices, and its Sec. of Corrections to remove and admit faults in its COVID-19 data.
Writing Clips
Equality AZ is Back, But Under the Man Who Doomed It
https://www.lookoutnews.org/equality-arizona-michael-soto/
Equality Arizona was one of Arizona's longest-running LGBTQ+ organizations focused on lobbying lawmakers for equal rights and legislation. But it's executive director ran it into the ground.
The 'Cowboy' Constable
Constables are not police officers in Arizona. Yet, they have the same impunity as other law enforcement. And when a tenant eviction went sideways in Phoenix, it exposed the lack of oversight into a little-known sector of law enforcement.
The Prison Sell
In an 18-month investigation in partnership with KJZZ Radio and USA Today, I lead a team of reporters to look at the ubiquity of prison labor in Arizona. We found that the state goes far beyond just using prisoner to make run-of-the-mill products for the state, such as license plates. Instead, they found a profitable market in selling prisoners to private companies.
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A Changing Story
https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2020/09/pa-state-police-bedford-shooting-civil-rights-marchers/
During Black Lives Matter marches in the summer of 2020, a little known city on the outskirts of a rural town in central Pennsylvania became viral after I originally reported on a shooting I had heard about via Twitter. That story turned into a follow-up investigation and collaboration with two local news outlets that spanned almost a year looking into the cultural friction that the shooter and his family brought onto the community. As a result of our reporting, charges were filed against the shooter. This story also won a Keystone Award in the features category.
Highway 'Stop and Frisk’
https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2020/08/pa-state-police-troopers-highway-stop-and-frisk/
In partnership with The Appeal, we gathered court records dating back 6 years, along with traffic stop incidents, and built a (very elementary) web scraper to grab traffic stop data by Pennsylvania State Police to find how many troopers pulled people over for routine traffic stops, and used those traffic stops as grounds for doing interdiction searches. While interdiction searches are nothing new, what we found out was how courts were routinely throwing these cases out, consistently calling these stops illegal, and state police knew but kept doing them, anyway. As a result of our reporting, the governor opened an investigation into the state police's traffic stops. This series also earned a Keystone Award in the investigations category.