About
Christina Jedra is a watchdog reporter for Honolulu Civil Beat, a nonprofit news organization in Hawaiʻi. Her work seeks to hold the government accountable for how it spends money and makes decisions that affect people's lives.
In 2024, Christina and her Civil Beat colleagues were recognized as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for their breaking news coverage of the deadly Maui wildfires of August 2023. Her stories exposed the questionable hiring of an inexperienced emergency manager as well as state and county agencies’ failure to plan for a foreseeable disaster.
For years, Christina has been Hawaii’s lead reporter covering the Red Hill water contamination crisis in which U.S. Navy fuel tainted the drinking water of 93,000 Pearl Harbor water customers. Christina’s reporting before and after the disaster occurred demonstrated how the Navy’s Red Hill fuel facility was a threat to the drinking water for years and that there were inadequate safeguards to detect a problem.
Her stories have also revealed Navy efforts to silence those who raised concerns about the facility and hide information from regulators and the public. Despite these obstacles, Christina was the first journalist to obtain video footage of the catastrophic fuel leak that contaminated the drinking water in November 2021.
Christina’s reporting on Red Hill has earned an Emmy Award and an Edward R. Murrow Award in partnership with Hawaii News Now and first place investigative reporting prizes from the Institute for Nonprofit News and Hawaii’s Society of Professional Journalists. In 2023, the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (SABEW) awarded Christina a Best in Business award for her “spectacular use of leaked video and other information to inform the public about a shocking hazard.”
Christina has also covered cops, courts and city and state government. Her stories have shed light on the failures of Honolulu’s labyrinthine permitting department, questionable spending of federal aid dollars and excessive overtime at the Honolulu Police Department, the lack of professional discipline for unscrupulous prosecutors and the dangers “forever chemicals” pose to Hawaii’s people and environment.
Previously, Christina was an investigative reporter for The News Journal in Wilmington, Delaware where her work sparked investigations and legislative changes. Her examination of a Wilmington City Council slush fund exposed abuse of taxpayer dollars and led to the criminal conviction of the former council chair. And her probe of a Delaware prison's addiction treatment program found that counselors were falsifying records, sparking an Attorney General investigation.
Christina's first job in journalism was at The Capital newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland.
Her work has also been published in The Baltimore Sun, The New England Center for Investigative Reporting, The Boston Globe, and USA Today. She has a degree in journalism from Emerson College in Boston.
Christina was born and raised in New Jersey and has strong feelings about quality bagels and pizza. She is the daughter of immigrants from Cyprus and Poland.