karishma mehrotra
writer
The Indian Express
I moved to India in February 2018 without a job but a determination to report. After getting hired at the Indian Express in April 2018, I deep-dived into the social-political life of technology. I covered American and Chinese technology companies in India, the ruling party’s use of data, and policing of social media speech. Regularly featured on the front page and agile in my topics, I jumped on covering COVID-19. Creating a significant rupture in the country, I interviewed Dr. Anthony Fauci at the peak of India’s brutal second wave, bringing a dire prescription to India’s paralyzing situation. Several stories led to major government reactions, such as my data-driven analysis of testing infrastructure in periphery states and exclusive interviews with top officials and corporates in charge of the pandemic response.
I later transitioned to covering migration and urbanization, tracking how COVID-19 was changing labor, surveillance, and social security. Within my first months on the beat, I immediately broke stories about water planning and migrant labor policies.
During my time at the Express, I traveled throughout Bihar to cover the 2019 Indian General Election. I also traveled across Pennsylvania to cover the 2020 US elections, with a series of front-page features describing post-industrial towns, the politics of the suburbs, and the shifting voting preferences of Asian-Americans. I wrote a feature from the US elections for Bloomberg Businessweek Magazine.
You can see my top clips here.
The Wall Street Journal
Long nights in the Atlanta WSJ newsroom for a summer taught me how to construct a story with depth, digging into the funding of the Atlanta BeltLine, attempting to synthesize Martin Luther King’s legacy in Atlanta, and running around the state asking bartenders and airplane passengers their opinions of Georgia’s new gun law for page 3 stories. But nearly as important were the weeks and weeks of editing articles, reconfiguring the infrastructure of the narrative to uncover the best possible way to tell the story.
See all my work here.
CNN
At CNN, I worked on "The Row" desk — the last stop-gate for on-air scripts and online stories. We fact-checked, looked for biases, discrepancies, unfairness, and any other ethical flags. I was a part of large discussions about ISIS hostage videos, anonymous Washington sources, and geographical mapping of contest borders.
Boston Globe
For my third summer of college, I worked as a business reporting intern at the Globe, writing over 40 clips about everything from in-depth features about race disparities in Boston business schools to breaking news about company mergers. I was feature on the front page of the paper within my first two weeks of the internship and also made it to centerpiece positions and section heads.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For the first semester of my sophomore year, I worked with the education team while Atlanta's public school system was on the front page of the daily paper constantly. With the cheating scandal entering into the legal stage and numerous school board candidates being challenged, it was an interesting time to reporting on Atlanta's education system. One of my stories reached the front page of the Sunday paper. It was about corporal punishment in Georgia schools. Check it out here or here.
When I was a freshman, I spent two days a week working with the PolitiFact team at the AJC. I refined my research and investigating skills by fact-checking the claims of Atlanta politicians and political gurus. My biggest story was a fact check about Emory's decision to boot Chick-fil-A from its campus. I spent one and a half months researching the decision to see if it had anything to do with Dan Cathy's comments. It ended up being teased on the front page of the AJC and on local TV. You can also see it here.
See all my work here.
Emory Wheel
As co-news editor of Emory University's biweekly newspaper and website, I work with reporters, create the budget, assign stories, edit and produce five news pages. All ethical dilemmas and decisions regarding news are within my purview. I was hired as assistant within the first month of my freshman year.
As staff reporter, I cover student-related topics, including breaking news, obituaries, events and university policies.
See my work here.
KCBS Radio
As an intern at KCBS Radio, the Bay Area's largest all-news radio station, I had the oppurtunity to cover the San Francisco plane crash, the gay marriage Supreme Court decisions and the Zimmerman trial.
Along with creating numerous anchor scripts per week, I was able to make my own demo podcasts for every script I wrote. Here they are.
From this internship, I learnt the real workings of a breaking news team. I discovered the balance between fact-checking and speed while also realizing my love for audio editing.
Palo Alto Weekly
At Palo Alto Weekly, I learnt the art of long-form magazine writing as well as the merits of hard-nosed, hyper local reporting. Topics that were once mundane — parking and construction — took on a whole new angle once I saw that the community cared. I wrote about recaps of city council meetings and breaking news about city fires.
On top of that, Palo Alto's technology sector was an intriguing part of the coverage. I did a feature on the innovative Google Glass applications popping up all over the city.
My biggest story was a front-page feature about the rise of multi-generational homes in Palo Alto. I talked to numerous families and experts to discover how this trend was manifesting itself.
I also wrote multiple neighborhood profiles and event pieces. My other features included topics like tree houses, technology and children and more.
See my work here.