New York World

Monday, May 17, 2010 was a usual day. I reached office around 10 in the morning and started working on my terminal. In the afternoon, Judy announced that party was ready and in a few minutes all of us had gathered in front of Mike’s desk- a usual place for having parties at the office. Surprise, surprise! It was organized to honor me. What? I saw Judy coming with two big metal plates and handing over them to Betsy. She asked me to come forward and got the special gift.

I literally screamed after seeing the plates; they were the printing plates of my first two stories published in the WSJ. It was really a great gift and meant a lot to me. Katie also visited me at Atlanta in the same week.

I left for New York on May 23 to attend Dow Jones News Fund’s one week long training workshop on business reporting. It was a great learning experience as I had never covered the business stories. The main focus was on covering business stories for wire service and to learn writing short. The best editors and reporters at WSJ and Dow Jones newswires shared their expertise and experiences. We also visited the main news room of WSJ.

The next week, I stayed with some Pakistani friends at Coney Island, Brooklyn. The very first night, they took me to the Atlantic City. We gambled and had ‘fun’ there the whole night. I lost $150 but they (4) lost more than $9000.

Next day, a party was organized ‘in my honor’ by the Pakistani friends. The food was really good but all of them wanted me to eat more as I am ‘too slim to survive the American tough life.’ Their ‘love and generosity’ ruined my stomach. I was supposed to visit WSJ head office on Tuesday, June 1 but could not do it till Thursday.

I attended all the important meetings of WSJ editors on Thursday and also met Deborah Brewster, managing editor, Matt Murray, deputy managing editor and Dagmar Aalund, deputy editor international. Deborah offered me that I could work at the metro section at the head office for two weeks. She also introduced me to the editor of ‘The Greater New York section.’

The same day I visited Bloomberg head office along with Nasry Esmat. Katie had arranged it for us.

Next day, I went to Proppublica and The New York Times. Kirk Kraeutler, enterprise editor foreign desk at NYT made it possible that I saw maximum during two and half hours visit. I attended two very important meetings of the decisions makers at NYT. It was great week and Katie played very important role and worked a lot to make it special one for me. Thanks.