by Poorna Shetty
Freelance Writer

Call me nostalgic, but there’s something about the process of producing a magazine that I’ll always love.

When I was editor of Asiana, it was a combination of frantic scrabbling during deadline week while the printers yelled on the phone for pages, culminating in the moment that made it all worth it – the first delivery of magazines smelling of freshly-minted paper containing all our hard work.

Going freelance was a choice not a byword for voluntary redundancy, and since then I’ve managed to travel the world and write for The Guardian, The Sunday Times Travel and The Daily Telegraph. Working in your pyjamas with all of the money and none of the office politics – no regrets.

Unfortunately, all that changed when the media felt the delayed, full-impact of the recession last year. There were scores of redundancies being made across newspapers and the market became flooded with freelancers.

Although the job market seems to have picked up, I’m reluctant to go back into permanent work unless the role is right. Working as an editor or even as a senior writer is challenging as you need to get your content together, liaise with the designers, make sure it’s right after it goes through production – and that’s not even including working alongside the publisher’s advertising agenda and the sales team.

Being a traditionalist who’s very attached to paper, online journalism and blogging had always left me a bit cold.

But while twiddling my thumbs last December, I decided to pass the time by researching for my own wedding, and discovered that there are practically no online Asian wedding sites, at least not any that seem to have been updated since 2007.

From then on I decided to set up my own Asian wedding blog, which brings together news and personal stories, featuring suppliers and ideas on a more real-time basis, as most wedding magazines are quarterly.

Apart from being able to layout and post information almost instantaneously, the thing I love most is that with the online Asian community, there doesn’t seem to be the kind of in-fighting that the magazines are so notorious for.

I’ve recently guest-blogged on a new website called The Asian Wedding, and would be happy to flag up any of the other sites such as The Asian Fashion Blog on my site. Perhaps it’s because we know how fluid and accessible information is online and there’s no point being precious about it.

If recessions teach us anything, it’s that we must learn to change and adapt our ways of working, and while the era of hand-to-mouth might be the case for most of us for a while, I think a positive repercussion has been to introduce me to a medium I have resisted for the past few years.

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Poorna Shetty edits and writes: The Asian Wedding Editor’s Guide
Picture by Neeta Lulla