World View:

Hello, my name is Imran. I am the Daily Pilot’s new city editor.

I’m filling in this week — my third week on the job — for Editor Brady Rhoades, who is vacationing in Ireland. Today I’m taking up a corner of the front-page, which normally is reserved for Brady’s Friday column, to introduce myself to the readers in Newport-Mesa whom our newspaper serves.

A transplant from New York City, I have lived in California on-and-off for seven years since quitting the Big Apple in June 2001. I am a newcomer to this patch of northwestern Orange County and to Long Beach, where I just moved.

I hope to stay a while and settle down somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area, because I’ve been a nomad, criss-crossing the globe almost since my time in the crib. My uncommon international background and cultural makeup is the most distinctive thing about me.

I’m a lot like Barack Obama. We are products of marriages between people from two or more races. We both were born during the tumultuous 1960s, when inter-racial relationships still were risky propositions. In my case, I was born in London to a French woman and a Sri Lankan man. I spent my early childhood in England, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Indonesia — where Barack too spent time as a boy!

When I was 7, my family moved to New York, where my dad, a globe-trotting Sri Lankan journalist, started a career as a U.N. diplomat. I attended the United Nations School, where the sons and daughters of U.N. personnel represented most of the U.N.’s member-states.

This is my first stab at a column. I hope to make it the first of a series of columns and blogs appearing in the Pilot. I am calling this column “World View” because I intend to use my international background and multicultural perspective to write about Newport-Mesa’s connections to international news. The idea is to write about immigrant communities in Costa Mesa or Newport Beach and their ties to Asia, Africa, South America and the globe’s other far reaches, or locals whose work or business has a global dimension. As a simple example, I could write about local Samoans or churches trying to reach out to help and send relief supplies to American Samoa after this week’s earthquake and tsunami. But I need readers like you to help me get in touch with those local folks or groups.

This also is my first job back in journalism after a six-month layoff. In March, I joined the millions of Americans and legions of idled fellow journalists queuing up for unemployment checks. I was laid off from my job as a hard-nosed schools beat reporter at the Riverside Press-Enterprise. I had worked there for four years, but was caught up in a downsizing of the newsroom.

During my layoff I came very close to quitting journalism. I have toiled as a journalist for about 15 years. The profession never has rewarded me with a high-paying salary, even though my career’s highlights include nearly three years spent as a reporter stationed in the war-ravaged nations of Cambodia and Sri Lanka.

Nor has it done justice to the caliber of my education. Not many journalists can brag about holding two master’s degrees: I happen to have a master’s in journalism from UC Berkeley and a master’s in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science. I may be a smart cookie, but one who’s still buried in debt from his college loans.

I have chosen to stick with journalism because I love to ask probing questions and to tell stories based on facts; I’m always learning something new; each day brings a different story; and journalism is a lot less boring than some of the more glamorous and higher-paying professions out there. And I decided to take the Daily Pilot job because it represents a new challenge for me: my first crack at an editing and newsroom managerial role. So far, the workload has been demanding but rewarding. Yet it’s strange to find myself thrust into a position of finding myself on the bossy end of the reporter-editor dynamic. At times, I fret that I might be pushing the reporters here too hard, and to the brink of mutiny.

My new job title is “city editor.” In reality, I’m Brady Rhoades’ deputy. He quips that I’m his co-pilot. He says my job is to help him shape the content that goes into the paper’s news pages and on its website. Brady brought me on board to help beef up the Pilot’s hard news coverage. So, while we’ll try to keep publishing a daily staple of features that are bright, positive and upbeat, you should expect to see more stories that are less fluffy and harder-hitting.

I’m always scrounging around — or scrambling at the last minute — for interesting and newsy ideas, so I would welcome your suggestions. I prefer stories that are in-depth and aren’t of the black-and-white, shock-value variety. My favorite stories are those that are complex and nuanced, stories in which people are struggling or succeeding against great odds, or stories about issues gripping communities or towns that aren’t clear-cut.

I also am open to criticism and fielding calls from irate readers. Please feel free to e-mail me at [email protected], or call me on my direct line: (714) 966-4633. I look forward to hearing from you.