Om Malik: Pioneering Blogs (Part 4)

Om is largely a self-taught guy, with little formal journalism school style training. But he has great instincts as a reporter, which he has always used to his advantage. What you read below is a remarkable story of having, simply put, “fire in the belly”.

SM: How did you manage to pull off the transition from writing for a South Indian magazine to becoming a writer at a mainstream American publication like Forbes? OM: I worked for a bunch of ethnic Indian newspapers in New York. Some of those gigs were not exactly satisfying. India Abroad was a pretty strong publication. India West had great editors who appreciated hard work. However, these places were not exactly happy places to work, but they toughened me up. I also went to school a bit as well to learn about fashion journalism.

SM: I had no idea you did that! OM: I thought that was so far out in the left field… abstract topics require your language skills to be very, very good. I spent two semesters doing that in the evenings after work. All of these jobs were part time gigs, and it never really seemed that I was there. It was just one step at a time, a learning process, and every day I learned something new. I read the newspapers a lot, I read magazines a lot, and basically I was re-educating myself. Whatever I did it was constant re-education.

SM: You were learning step by step. OM: I knew nobody was going to teach me, so I figured I would have to figure it out myself. I remember when I was younger, I was reading the Wall Street Journal where this guy Greg Zachary used to write. He is now at Stanford. I would read his stuff and I would completely imitate it. Every story had to be like his.

I ended up getting a job at a Japanese newswire to cover microcontrollers. That was the un-fun part. Nobody wanted to cover the damn thing. It was the least sexy job you could have. For me, however, it was fun. It was part of my education. I started at the basic building blocks of technology. At the end of the day it is all about the Silicon, not about chatty social networks.

I have a unique view from the bottom up, and I still think like that. From there, I went to processors and saw the launch of Windows 95, the troubles at Apple, the rise of Cisco, the emergence of the Internet as an economic phenomena. I wrote about Netscape very early on. I was naturally gravitating to all things network. The funny thing is I didn’t really know it. My mind was pushing me in that direction, that was the reason I got interested in technology – after CompuServe and reading about ARPANET in Forbes magazine.

[to be continued]

[Part 3]
[Part 2]
[Part 1]

This segment is part 4 in the series : Om Malik: Pioneering Blogs
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