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Daniel Pearl Journalism Past Interns

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Daniel Pearl
Daniel Pearl

The Daniel Pearl Memorial Journalism Internship is awarded annually to an outstanding Stanford student journalist, and commemorates the work of Daniel Pearl, a Stanford graduate who was kidnapped and murdered while working as a Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent in Pakistan in 2002.

The internship itself is in a foreign bureau of the Wall Street Journal.

2023 Daniel Pearl Intern: Anastasiia Malenko

Anastasiia Malenko is a senior majoring in Economics and Political Science. She previously worked as a news and magazine editor at The Stanford Daily, covering politics and international relations. She is a contributing writer at The Kyiv Independent and has written for The Ukrainian Weekly and Studway.

Headshot of Elissa Miolene

2022 Daniel Pearl Intern: Elissa Miolene

Elissa Miolene has been chosen as the 2022 Daniel Pearl Memorial Journalism Intern. Miolene is a master’s student in the Graduate program in Journalism.

Elena Shao

2020 Daniel Pearl Intern: Elena Shao

Elena Shao has been chosen as the 2020 Daniel Pearl Memorial Journalism Intern. Shao is a junior majoring in Political Science.

Alexa Corse

2019 Daniel Pearl Intern: Alexa Corse

Alexa Corse has been chosen as the 2019 Daniel Pearl Memorial Journalism Intern.  Corse is a senior majoring in political science.

Kiley Roache

2018 Daniel Pearl Intern: Kiley Roache

Kiley Roache has been chosen as the 2018 Daniel Pearl Memorial Journalism Intern. Roache is a senior majoring in Political Science. She has previously interned at the San Francisco Chronicle and was part of the Chicago Tribune’s teen publication The Mash

Emma Johanningsmeier

2017 Daniel Pearl Intern: Emma Johanningsmeier

Emma Johanningsmeier has been chosen as the 2017 Daniel Pearl Memorial Journalism Intern. Johanningsmeier is a junior double-majoring in Comparative Literature and Italian. She has studied in Italy and lived in Germany, and previously interned at the Omaha World-Herald in Omaha, Nebraska, her hometown.

Alexa Liautaud

2016 Daniel Pearl Intern: Alexa Liautaud

Liautaud is a senior majoring in History with a minor in Middle Eastern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. She is fluent in French and has spent all four years at Stanford studying Arabic. She interned at Bloomberg News her sophomore and junior summers, and is writing an honors thesis on military cultural sensitivity training and American counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

Ileana Najarro

2015 Daniel Pearl Intern: Ileana Najarro

Najarro is a senior majoring in Communication. She will work in the Mexico City bureau of The Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2015.

Edward Ngai

2014 Daniel Pearl Intern: Edward Ngai

In an essay he wrote as part of the application process, Ngai described Pearl’s ability to share with Journal readers a humanistic awareness of “the world’s arbitrary generosity and cruelty.”

Riva Gold

2013 Daniel Pearl Intern: Riva Gold

In an essay written as part of the application process, Gold noted that by reporting on broad social and political issues through the lens of ordinary people, “Daniel Pearl was able to unmask the diverse faces affected by … larger issues, and at the same time, exposed the common humanity in his sources.”

Kathleen Chaykowski

2012 Daniel Pearl Intern: Kathleen Chaykowski

In an essay written as part of the application process, Chaykowski noted that Daniel Pearl’s “attention to the ambiguity and surprises he encountered yielded stories that delve far beyond the black and white. It is the gray — the small, human moments, the contradictions — that I aspire to capture through my own reporting.”

Alexandra Wexler

2011 Daniel Pearl Intern: Alexandra Wexler

In an essay written as part of the application process, Wexler, noted that “the most interesting pieces of journalism for me are those that tell the story of someone ordinary and outside the limelight. Their stories touch our lives because they are just like you and me — ordinary people living in the same everyday world.”

Devin Banerjee

2010 Daniel Pearl Intern: Devin Banerjee

In an essay written as part of the application process, Banerjee noted that Pearl rooted his stories in conversations with everyday people, “for it often was their absence from the larger conversation that yielded a nature of misunderstanding—the failure to connect the dots.”

Ketaki Gokhale

2009 Daniel Pearl Intern: Ketaki Gokhale

In an essay written as part of the application process, Gokhale described reporting on the plight of Punjab farm workers who suffered because the Indian American farmers who employed them were either ignorant of pesticide safety regulations or ignored them.

Jennifer Martinez

2008 Daniel Pearl Intern: Jennifer Martinez

Daniel Pearl understood that readers are better able to grasp the magnitude of international tragedies by weaving narratives of the people who experienced them into his writing.

Niraj Sheth

2007 Daniel Pearl Intern: Niraj Sheth

In an essay written as part of the application process, Sheth said that Pearl knew that reporters must sometimes confront intolerance

Will Oremus

2005 Daniel Pearl Intern: Will Oremus

In a time of red states and blue states – a time when televised shouting matches between liberal and conservative ideologues pass for political journalism – the world could benefit from having more people like Daniel Pearl.

Ramin Setoodeh

2004 Daniel Pearl Intern: Ramin Setoodeh

Pearl’s stories seemed to understand that culture went deeper than skin color — there was the world of beauty pageant contestants in Jonesboro, Georgia; pharmacists in Bombay, India; carpet weavers in Ben, Iran.

First Daniel Pearl Intern Chosen: Vauhini Vara

Journalism is about people. It’s about allowing real human beings to tell the journalist what the story is, instead of the other way around.