Who is Elijah Pittman?

Introduction

Elijah Pittman is a journalist, photographer, DJ, and a senior journalism major at Howard University. Elijah operates under an anti-colonial framework that focuses on the African experience domestically and abroad as its contextualized by history and social forces. Elijah’s goal in multimedia communication is to significantly contribute to building the consciousness of Africans domestically and abroad with journalism at the forefront. Elijah sees all of his multimedia work, photography, DJing, and journalism, as vessels for the communicaton of historically rooted political knowledge surrounding the African experience.

Journalism

Elijah is currently an investigative reporting fellow at the Investigative Reporting Workshop, where he has spent the last two years working on projects related to the African-descendant experience. His primary project with IRW has been focused on environmental justice for Black communities in Baltimore City. Elijah also contributed to “Forty Acres and a Lie,” for Mother Jones, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in the explanatory reporting category.

In 2024, Elijah was a reporting fellow with Maryland Matters, where he covered state and local politics, especially as they related to the Black experience. Elijah broke a story on how Baltimore’s Fixed Price Housing Program, which city leaders lauded as an opportunity to restore homeownership to Black Baltimore residents, was denying most Baltimore residents and instead approving outside developers to buy city-owned lots of land in Black neighborhoods. Additionally, Elijah covered the Amtrak tunnel being built under Black neighborhoods in West Baltimore, the commodification of Juneteenth, and Baltimore City’s successes in winning lawsuits against companies deemed responsible for their role in the city’s opioid crisis.

In 2023, Elijah worked as an intern for the Multicultural Media Correspondents Association, where he produced social media content, conducted interviews on Capitol Hill, and brought a critical mindset that refined and changed ideas for the association.

Also in summer 2023, Elijah participated in the NABJ student projects as a print writer for the NABJ Monitor. For that paper, Elijah covered both misinformation generated by social media outlets that target Black consumers and the reasoning behind the lack of radicalism at HBCUs. For the convention itself, Elijah covered the NABJ and NAHJ split, the election of NABJ president Ken Lemon, and the NABJ board business meeting.

Elijah originally broke ground on his journalism path in 2022 when he arrived at Morgan State University, where he worked for The Spokesman, the school’s student-run newspaper. There, Elijah covered Morgan State’s placement of metal detectors in on-campus dormitories, the 1991 campus student protest, and Morgan State’s President’s summer trip to Israel. Before Morgan State, Elijah served as both a writer and, later, the co-editor-in-chief of his high school’s yearbook, the Lance.