•SHALINI LANGER: How do you decide the balance between what the people may want to read and what you think the people should be reading? A lot of people want to read about Carla Sarkozy.

I was an editor during the whole dismal Monica Lewinsky thing and we didn’t want to be covering that but obviously, we had no choice. I think you start off by doing what you think matters and then you address the question of what you have to do about Carla Sarkozy on the basis of how new it is. When she was new, you had to something. Now they’ve been married for a while, maybe you don’t have to do much anymore.

•COOMI KAPOOR: So you don’t believe that what the reader wants is what you should give?

I’ve always mistrusted that phrase “the reader wants”, because how do we know exactly what the reader wants? I think you should give the reader a fresh and original paper that’s very well-written and covers all sorts of things —.social trends, fashion, the works but I think you are at your best when you give the reader something the reader wants that the reader didn’t know he or she wanted it till you gave it to her. Nobody is going to abandon you because you went three days in a row without mentioning Sarkozy’s wife.

•PREETI JHA: What advice would you give young reporters?

Don’t get beaten. Figure out what really matters on the beat. Think independently about what’s in front of you. The trouble with editors is that they are influenced in what they demand from reporters by what they read. You have the opportunity to give them something they’ve never read before and another name for that is news.

... contd.