karishma mehrotra
writer
The Wall Street Journal
For the summer of 2014, I was a paid, full-time intern for the Atlanta bureau of the Wall Street Journal. I wrote numerous page 3 stories, created video, broke news, and spoke on WSJ Radio. I wrote about Hurricane Arthur, guns, the World Cup, a Syrian bomber and life-threatening diseases. For 10 weeks, I worked late into the night, traveled over weekends and focused only on my work at WSJ. For two days, I worked from the New York office and met many of the editors and reporters there.
Breaking News: Hurricane Arthur
I was the main reporter on the Hurricane Arthur story. I continued to update the WSJ website with the scene in North Carolina and two of my stories made it to page 3 in the paper. One of my stories was the fourth most read story on WSJ.com and received more than 2,000 clicks. The stories were featured on the homepage of the website for a whole day. Editor Gerard Baker featured one of the articles in his daily email newsletter and WSJ's social media team heavily promoted the stories.
I competed with every other major news organization to report on Atlanta's new civil rights museum. My page 3 story focused less on the building itself and more on its meaning in the city's struggle to embrace its civil rights legacy. This story also stood as the website's main story for most of the day.
Landing on Page 3 again, I worked on one of my most research-intensive articles about the Atlanta BeltLine for much of my internship. While previous long form pieces depicted the urban renewal project's potential, I found that the planners were facing many obstacles. I interviewed dozens and dozens of sources, from former mayors to BeltLine walkers, to understand the true sentiment towards this city-changing plan.
For the Arena section of the paper, I turned a local story about the sale of a state university's radio station into a national feature once I found that Atlanta wasn't the only city experiencing this. Cash-strapped universities are discovering that their student stations are lucrative assets. They are finding eager partners in public-radio stations. The printed photographs were also taken by me.
In anticipation of Georgia's new gun law, I traveled across the state to hear different perspectives. From bars in downtown Atlanta to gun shops hours outside of the city to the airport, I interviewed dozens and dozens of locals to hear how people on the ground felt. This story was also on page three.
When FedEx was indicted this summer, I wrote a daily about how much responsibility shippers have for the content in the box for the WSJ's Corporate Intelligence Blog. It received such a positive response that the editors asked me to add more legal research to the story for a print article in the Market section.
When the bureau's political reporter left on assignment, the Georgia's senate race fell onto my lap. I wrote a quick blog post for the Washington Wire and ventured to several voting booths for a print story the next day. I contributed to the results story as well.
A beat reporter and I worked on a large feature for the front page of the Markets section about smokers in America. I spent days looking for sources across America and analyzing the data. I mined the internet for restaurants that serve smokers in Minnesota and college-aged smokers in Wisconsin. I also contributed to the breaking news about the cigarette brand merger.
One Friday night, I got a late night call to come back in the office. For the next few hours, I worked with a fellow reporter on tracking down anyone who knew anything about the man from Florida who was identified as a suicide bomber in Syria. The next day, the story showed up in print and I continued to report for an online story that day.
One day for work, my boss told me to report from a bar for a nationwide story about the World Cup. I, along with reporters all across the country, helped explain why this might be soccer's moment in America.
My first story for the WSJ landed on page 6. After a day of research and pre-writing, I realized that I wasn't following the real story -- the real measles outbreak was in an amish community in Ohio. The day of my deadline, I speedily redialed my sources and compiled a new story.