Najia Ashar

Najia Ashar is a broadcast journalist and media development professional with more than 20 years of experience in Pakistan’s mainstream media. She is the founder and president of Global Neighborhood for Media Innovation (GNMI), a nonprofit organization working for media literacy, capacity building and advocacy. Through her organization, Ashar reinvented newsrooms all across Pakistan and has given training to thousands of media workers to report on human rights, CVE, gender-based violence and safety and security through diverse digital tools and entrepreneurial journalism. Prior to this, Ashar received one of the most prestigious and well-known fellowships, the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, in 2014 and the East West Center Fellowship in 2013. She worked with top news channels — Geo News, AJJ TV and GNN TV — as a producer and program host from 2004 to 2019. She holds a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Karachi. Her most recent initiative is a digital news platform, taar.tv, that was launched in October 2021.