Adeshina Emmanuel

Adeshina Emmanuel is the editor-in-chief at Injustice Watch, a nonprofit investigative newsroom based in Chicago. Ade is a lifelong Chicagoan, born and raised in the Uptown community by an African-American mother and Nigerian father. He still lives in Uptown, where he grew up, and is the proud uncle of three. Ade was a senior journalism student at Loyola University Chicago in December 2011 when he got his first journalism job as a Chicago Sun-Times wire reporter. After leaving the Sun-Times for a New York Times reporting internship in D.C. the following summer, Adeshina worked from October 2012 to October 2014 as a DNAinfo neighborhood reporter covering Uptown where he grew up.

Next, at the Chicago Reporter, he investigated racial inequity, policing, and economic justice for nearly two years, winning a 2015 Peter Lisagor Award for his reporting on economic injustice and resilience in the Woodlawn community. Ade then worked as a freelance writer from May 2016 to May 2018. He produced acclaimed articles, investigations, and special projects for local and national outlets, including City Bureau, the South Side Weekly, the Chicago Reader, Ebony Magazine, In These Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Parts Unknown.

After freelancing, Ade worked from May 2018 to September 2019 as an education reporter at Chalkbeat, a national nonprofit newsroom covering schools. He collaborated with editors to help establish Chalkbeat's coverage and community engagement strategy in Chicago and published “How It Feels to Be Javion," which the Education Writers Association selected as a 2018 finalist for best feature story. Ade also used his voice at Chalkbeat to urge critical conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion that helped spur subsequent DEI initiatives. He kept that same energy when he arrived at Injustice Watch in Fall 2019 as a reporter and was a catalyst for a comprehensive and ongoing DEI effort. Ade also arrived with dreams of moving into leadership—and those dreams came true at a pivotal and unprecedented moment—amid a pandemic and national uprisings against racial injustice. He was promoted to editor in April 2020 and named editor-in-chief in December 2020.