Jonathan Shainin was the senior editor at The Caravan, an English-language long-form journalism magazine, for three years before leaving India in October to become the news editor at The New Yorker’s website, where he commissions and edits both domestic and international news stories.

He sat with India Ink at the Jaipur Literature Festival over the weekend to discuss the possibilities and pitfalls of foreign correspondence in India and India’s evolving media landscape.

Q.  Foreign journalists – and by extension their editors – are often accused of peddling overly negative, simplistic or even dismissive narratives of India. How do you interpret those assertions?

A.  A foreign correspondent once pointed out to me that the idea of foreign correspondence, at least in the way we normally think of it, is kind of a Western invention. Having said that, I don’t think it’s an inherently colonial enterprise, but I do think that all foreign correspondence is based on a set of premises and preconceptions, not always bad ones, about what’s interesting to your particular audience about the place you cover, and what narrative about that place seems right at a certain time.

Read the whole interview here.