Kiran Nazish

Overview

Kiran Nazish is a Pakistani journalist who spent two decades as a foreign and war correspondent before founding the Coalition For Women In Journalism (CFWIJ) in 2017. The turning point was both personal and professional: she had expected that working for the New York Times — “a place where I expected good values” — would be the best time of her career, and found instead that she “couldn’t overcome inequality” there (Lenfest Institute). That experience, layered on years of covering wars across the Middle East and South Asia, pushed her to build an organization around the one thing she never had: mentorship and support for women journalists.

Early life and education

Nazish was born and raised in Pakistan, in a middle-class family where women were not expected to work in the media. She wanted to be a journalist from childhood, but her father wanted her to study science and engineering. At age seven, she had her first essay published — a piece on how to have good handwriting — in the children’s section of Dawn, which she describes as Pakistan’s prestigious English-language paper, “like the New York Times in Pakistan.” She kept writing small stories for the children’s paper, and at about fifteen and a half she got an internship at the paper (Lenfest Institute).

She studied economics, math and statistics to a double master’s level while working as a journalist throughout her university years — in print, radio and television. By the time she finished her bachelor’s, she was working as a producer for a leading news channel. “I was born to be a journalist,” she says (Lenfest Institute).

Two decades of conflict reporting

Nazish has been a journalist since 1999, starting in Pakistan. In the early 2000s she moved into foreign correspondence, covering conflict, peace and security across South Asia and the Middle East — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, Mexico, Nepal, India and Georgia, reporting on terrorism, foreign policy and human rights (Sivil Sayfalar, Brandon University News). In 2014 she reported on the rise of ISIS from the Turkey-Syria border (Brandon University News).

Her work appeared in Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy, Forbes and local and foreign publications, covering socio-political issues and people affected by war. At one point she worked for GEO, a Pakistani television channel, on a company salary with travel, communication and on-set meals paid for. A 2013 interview for The Diplomat found her traveling to Peshawar to report on internally displaced persons in the Jalozai camp, and working on a story about Veeru Kohli, a freed bonded laborer in interior Sindh running for election against powerful feudal landlords (Salem-News / The Diplomat).

She spent a year and a half working at the New York Times — and found the same gender inequality there that she had seen in Pakistan. Women who had worked for 30 to 40 years were still working under unequal conditions, she said; the newsroom’s inequality struck her harder than anything she had faced in war zones, because it came from “a place where I expected good values” (Sivil Sayfalar, Lenfest Institute).

Being a woman shaped her reporting in both directions. She was one of the only female correspondents able to reach places men could not — she interviewed the Taliban and Al Qaeda, traveled tribal regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and entered refugee areas where only women were permitted. At the same time, she was called a spy in three different countries, had sources refuse her information because she was a woman, and navigated newsrooms she describes as misogynistic in Pakistan and unequal in the West (Lenfest Institute, Salem-News / The Diplomat).

Breakdown and the founding of the Coalition

In 2015, after years of covering wars — and losing friends and colleagues who were killed — Nazish broke down. She suffered panic attacks, ended up in hospital feeling she was going to die, and was simultaneously receiving threats from Pakistani intelligence agencies (Lenfest Institute).

After leaving hospital, she started interviewing experienced women journalists and found a recurring pattern: none of them had ever had mentors or support. CFWIJ grew out of that research, launched in 2017 in New York as a pro-bono network with her journalist friend Kati Marton — a 30-year veteran — and later formalized as an NGO. It became, in Brandon University’s description, a worldwide support organization based out of New York (Lenfest Institute, Sivil Sayfalar, Brandon University News).

The coalition runs two programs. The mentorship program pairs early- and mid-career journalists with veteran ones in long-term relationships — deliberately targeting women about four to five years into their careers, the point where a survey of 101 Canadian, US and Mexican newsroom workers found 62% plateauing for lack of mentors and support systems. Nazish made meditation compulsory for mentees — using the Ten Percent Happier app, founded by a journalist who had a breakdown on television — and asks every mentee to eventually become a mentor herself. She says 99% of the mentorships have succeeded, with mentees going on to become foreign correspondents and win awards (Lenfest Institute).

The advocacy program documents assaults on women journalists through a reporting system on the coalition’s website — a harassment-report button, with identities kept confidential on request — publishing press releases and year-end data (Sivil Sayfalar). From that grew a press-freedom newsroom: CFWIJ now documents attacks on women journalists in 128 countries, arguing the gender dimension had been missing from legacy press-freedom organizations’ coverage. In 2020 it documented 716 cases of threats and violence — up 138.6% from 291 in 2019 — including four murders, with violations linked in many cases to suppression of Covid-19 coverage and to protest coverage from the United States to Belarus to Hong Kong (Lenfest Institute, Digital Content Next).

CFWIJ opened offices in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Mexico, and activated in Turkey in April 2019 — deliberately, because Turkey was the country with the most imprisoned women journalists. The coalition campaigned on their cases, began a documentary about women journalists released from prison, and sought talks with the government and opposition on law and judiciary reforms (Sivil Sayfalar).

Academia and later work

In 2019 Nazish joined Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada, as that year’s Stanley Knowles Distinguished Visiting Professor — a position named for the university’s second chancellor, reserved for visiting scholars with an international reputation in their discipline. She gave public talks, lectured in classes, and planned research into immigrant and Indigenous experiences in western Manitoba. Given the scope of her plans, her standard four-month term was extended to eight months, and later extended again to August 31, 2020 (Brandon University News).

Separately, she spent a year studying neuroscience and social neuroscience to understand the human brain, part of her interest in why inequality persists structurally — a theme that runs through both her journalism and her advocacy (Lenfest Institute).

What this profile does not claim

The case counts CFWIJ publishes (70 cases in May 2021, 716 in 2020) come from the organization’s own documentation as reported by trade outlets; no independent audit of those figures was found, and this profile does not verify the individual incidents. The 2013 Diplomat interview was read via a Salem-News reprint rather than the original page. Several Wikipedia-derived leads — teaching at O.P. Jindal Global University in Delhi, journalism programs at LUMS in Lahore, and a New America senior fellowship — could not be independently re-verified from a fully-read source and are not asserted here.