The Pearl Project

Searching for Daniel Pearl's killer

by Colette Maddock

Asra Nomani stands with students in The Pearl Project classroom. Photo by: Douglas Adesko

Daniel Pearl, a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, was abducted and murdered in Pakistan in 2002. His death did not go unnoticed by millions of people across the world and inspired a class at Georgetown University to investigate and report on the truth behind his murder.

The Pearl Project was started by Asra Nomani, a colleague of Pearl’s who was with him in Pakistan before his abduction, and Barbara Feinman Todd, who was at that time the associate dean of journalism in the School of Continuing Studies at Georgetown University.

The duo created a seminar class that was modeled after the Arizona Project, designed to give students a hands-on opportunity to practice real-world investigative journalism while at the same time uncovering the truth behind Pearl’s abduction and eventual murder.

Nine years after Pearl was killed, the project is complete. The Pearl Project identified 27 men who were involved in his murder; at least 14 of those men are still thought to be free. The project inspired a new way of teaching foreign and investigative journalism, immersing students in a real-life newsroom setting, while at the same time doing a service to the public.

Feinman Todd emphasized the importance for journalism students to practice journalism that really matters. “What I worry about just for the future of our country is that if there’s too much of an emphasis on the sort of celebrity news and the easy stuff that our citizens won’t be well informed or able to make good decisions,” she said.

Foreign news coverage is being drastically cut down at many mainstream publications. “Who’s going to do the foreign news coverage if all of these traditional newspapers are being downsized and if the TV stations are getting rid of their foreign news bureaus because of the expense?” Feinman Todd wonders. Feinman Todd and Nomani think that the answer lies in classes like the Pearl Project that educate students in the best practices of reporting, and at the same time provide the public with valuable journalism that takes a lot of time, patience and resources.

“It really shows us potential, and it’s also a window into the difficulties and challenges,” Nomani said of the Pearl Project as a model for future investigative reporting seminar classes.

“I think we owe it to our world to keep investigative journalism alive. It’s a check on powers and an accountability that our world really needs,” Nomani said.


Feinman Todd became interested in the Pearl Project when she was reaching out to minority trade groups and journalism groups to try to get more students of color and different ethnicities involved in journalism. A mutual contact brought her to Nomani because of her connection within the south Asian journalism community. After corresponding with each other, Feinman Todd offered Nomani a job teaching at Georgetown, to which she reluctantly agreed.

The product of their teaming was more than they had both hoped for.

Feinman Todd says she wishes that the project hadn’t taken so long but said it was eventually completed because they had the time and support they needed. Georgetown University provided the students and teachers, the Center for Public Integrity provided the resources that the university didn’t have — like libel lawyers — and the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation provided the funding that they needed to complete the project.

The three-credit class took up much of the students’ time, and Feinman Todd acknowledged that the students put forth much more effort than would have been required for another class worth the same amount of credit. But students also got more out of the seminar than they did from other classes.

“I think working on something that was bigger than themselves, that was more than just increasing their GPA or learning how to write a lead, rather than learning one isolated thing or having it look good on your resume. It was more than an academic exercise; it really, really mattered” Feinman Todd said.

The students agree. “Unlike other classes, where you learn facts or theories and are tested on your ability to recollect and analyze them, the Pearl Project taught me about life itself and my role in it,” said student Margo Humphries.


The students and teachers working on the Pearl Project had to overcome the dual challenges that face both foreign reporters and college students. “I’m picturing the students sleeping on the floor of our offices so they could call Pakistan at the right time,” she said.

Feinman Todd remembers she worried about students being able to emotionally and psychologically handle the daily stress and trauma that went along with confronting the atrocities that were carried out by Pearl’s captors.

Nomani recognized the challenges associated with being thousands of miles away from the epicenter of the investigation: Karachi, Pakistan. “Ideally we’d be knocking on doors and meeting sources in coffee shops,” she said. It was hard for the class to know who to trust, especially when they were thousands of miles away, making phone calls in the middle of the night, in Washington, D.C.

Problems weren’t limited to physical problems, though. The investigation involved uncovering layers of information, and oftentimes finding that they had been misled, backpedaling and starting again. Particularly challenging were the names. “We started with the names of four men who were convicted and the rest was just alphabet soup of aliases and initials and crazy monikers,” Nomani said. She credits having 32 people looking at the case from various angles to their eventual understanding of the identities of those involved in Pearl’s abduction and murder.

While the class implicated 27 different men involved in the case, there is a sense of uncertainty about what the outcome of the information will be. Nomani acknowledged that traditionally journalists report the truth and then leave things to higher authorities. “It’s up to Pakistani officials to pursue those men and the U.S. to encourage them to,” she said about what the countries should do in the face of the 14 men who have yet to be charged.

Through their work on the Pearl Project, Nomani and Feinman Todd have created a permanent project at Georgetown that investigates the murders of various journalists around the world. During the fall 2010 semester, the class covered the Democratic Republic of Congo, and in spring 2011 they are covered the murders of journalists in Iraq.

Pearl Project student Kira Zalan said, “I was part of something that I believe is incredibly important: a fight to get the inconvenient truth on record, and the statement that crimes against journalists will not go unnoticed."

A Q&A with the students of the Pearl Project can be found online here.