From a news release from Stanford University:
Devin Banerjee, editor in chief of the Stanford Daily, has been awarded the 2010 Daniel Pearl Memorial Journalism Internship, which will have him working in one of the Wall Street Journal's foreign bureaus this summer.
Banerjee is working toward a degree in management science and engineering, with a concentration in technology and policy. He expects to graduate in 2011.
The internship was established to commemorate the work and ideals of 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, 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."
Banerjee is from Calabasas, in Southern California, and he has previously held internships at the San Jose Mercury News and the JoongAng Daily in Seoul, Korea.
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.
Congrats to Banerjee (it's also nice to see a South Asian running one of the country's biggest college dailies; and thanks to Peter Bhatia, editor of The Oregonian, and Stanford alum, for the alert).
See an archive of Banerjee's stories.
Daniel Pearl, when he was working in India and Pakistan, was an active member of SAJA's e-mail lists... Since 2002, we pay tribute each year to his memory by presenting the SAJA Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding Coverage of South Asia (watch for this year's call for entries shortly).
