Photo by Joel Tsui
Leila Goldstein is a print and audio journalist based in Phnom Penh covering stories across Southeast, covering stories spanning labour rights violations, environmental destruction and human trafficking. Her reporting has been published by NPR, BBC, The Guardian, Marketplace, The World, Dialogue Earth, Southeast Asia Globe, CamboJA News and Prachatai. She was selected as a 2025 Ferriss-UC Berkeley Journalism Fellow to report on the expansion of ketamine production and trafficking in Southeast Asia. As a 2024 Pulitzer Center Longworth Media Fellow, she covered the impact of U.S. solar tariffs on the global solar manufacturing supply chain, from Vietnam to Ohio. Earth Journalism Network has also awarded her grant funding to support her reporting.
Before relocating to Cambodia in 2023, she was a public radio journalist in the U.S. As a reporter at NPR member station WYSO, she reported and produced the award-winning podcast Trafficked about misinformation and human trafficking. Her investigation of the Ohio Attorney General’s human trafficking stings uncovered that the vast majority of the victims the state claimed to have rescued were in fact arrested. The podcast received a First Place Series Award from the Public Media Journalists Association and a Best Enterprise Reporting Award from the Ohio Associated Press Media Editors.
She is a former Shansi Fellow in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and a graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and Oberlin College. Find her @leila_goldstein or leilamgoldstein@gmail.com.