Prithi Paul Singh Sethi

My life as a journalist began with reading the funny pages on the living room floor and Time magazines. Even as a kid, the funny pages gave a “don’t be so serious” lift to my day while the Time magazines informed my world with serious tales of global importance.

Determined to work in journalism at whatever opportunity I had, I sold advertising and wrote for a film-industry newspaper, which acquainted me with the symbiosis of journalism and advertising. To supplement my income, I also became a paralegal, which fine-tuned my radar to the legal aspects of newspaper reporting and publishing.

I am a freelance journalist for several publications, writing on a laptop from home, which is my introduction to the technical direction of journalism that has become dominant in newsrooms.

The technological aspect of my journalistic — and other — careers have kept me current with the opportunities and challenges of online journalism that have already replaced many reputable print operations. For even as I continue to write for The New Times and Yes! Magazine, I am also learning new communication technologies in my positions with a medical laboratory and a real estate firm.

Throughout this training, and in the design of several websites, I have found the assistance of friendly, customer-oriented “help” desks invaluable to maintaining a productive web presence. Cooperation with technical support, which includes simple troubleshooting, problem reporting, desktop fixes and work-around, requires patience and clarity in using a common nomenclature to determine the problem and find a solution. It may seem odd that customer service has become so critical in the practice of online journalism, but it is so.

Journalism must take on the challenge of developing a common language for interactivity with the web, be it in reporting and publishing, or in reading and responding to the news. Cooperation between experts in two very different fields – journalism and technology – is critical to moving forward.

As blogs of independent “journalists” rise on the internet, I both appreciate the common-man perspective and outright truth-telling, while I have misgivings about that perspective and how accurate the truth-telling really is.