Graduate student Ketaki Gokhale awarded Daniel Pearl Internship

Ketaki Gokhale, a Stanford graduate student, has been awarded the 2009 Daniel Pearl Memorial Journalism Internship, which she will spend in a foreign bureau of the Wall Street Journal this summer.

Gokhale is working toward a master's degree in communication, specializing in journalism, which she plans to finish in June.

The internship was established to commemorate the work and ideals of Daniel Pearl, a Stanford graduate and Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002.

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

"In his life and work, Daniel Pearl was an exemplar of this impulse. Whether reporting from war-torn Kosovo or a child beauty pageant in the American South, Pearl would focus on the most ordinary of people, telling their stories in a way that lent them dignity and created understanding between disparate people," she wrote.

Gokhale is from Marin County and has worked at India-West newspaper in San Leandro, Calif., and New America Media, a consortium of ethnic media based in San Francisco. She is a graduate of Brown University.

A committee of Communication Department faculty members evaluated applicants for the internship. The final decision was made by the Wall Street Journal.

Pearl, a 1985 graduate of Stanford's Department of Communication, was kidnapped in Karachi on Jan. 23, 2002, while working on a story retracing the steps of "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. A month later, on Feb. 21, his captors released a videotape of his slaying. He was 38.

For more information about the internship, visit the web at http://communication.stanford.edu/internships/pearl/index.html.

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