Naresh Fernandes

Co-Founder and Editor, Scroll.in · Author, Taj Mahal Foxtrot and City Adrift

Mumbai (Bombay), Maharashtra, India

Scroll.in (Co-Founder & Editor)

Time Out India (former Editor-in-Chief)

Wall Street Journal (former)

Associated Press (former)T

imes of India (former)

NYU Institute of Public Knowledge (Poiesis Fellow)

Biography

Naresh Fernandes is a Mumbai-based journalist, author, and cultural historian who has spent four decades at the intersection of Indian public affairs, urban culture, and the business of journalism. He is best known internationally as the co-founder and editor of Scroll.in, one of India's most widely read and respected independent digital news publications, which he helped launch in January 2014 alongside entrepreneur Samir Patil and Jennifer O'Brien. Equally, he is recognised in literary and music circles as the author of Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay's Jazz Age — a work of cultural history that excavated the largely forgotten story of Bombay's mid-twentieth-century jazz scene through meticulous archival research and an ear for the lived city. He is a former editor-in-chief of Time Out India and has worked at the Times of India and Associated Press in Mumbai and at the Wall Street Journal in New York. He maintains a Poiesis Fellowship from the Institute of Public Knowledge at New York University and has been a member of the editorial policy board of the World Policy Journal. His journalism has appeared in the New York Times, the Hindustan Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, The New Yorker, Transition, and Harper's, among many other publications.

Career in Print and Wire Journalism

Fernandes began his journalism career in India, working as a sub-editor and reporter at the Times of India in Mumbai — a formative experience he has written about with characteristic candour, noting that starting in the age of print instilled a permanent horror of typographical error that the digital age has only deepened rather than relieved. He subsequently worked for the Associated Press bureau in Mumbai, bringing the discipline of wire service journalism — precision, speed, and the obligation to be useful to editors who know nothing about your local context — to bear on his reporting of Indian affairs. His career then took him to New York, where he worked for the Wall Street Journal, acquiring a fluency in international financial and business journalism that would later inform his understanding of the business pressures facing independent news organisations. Before launching Scroll, he served as editor-in-chief of Time Out India, which published editions in Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore — a role that gave him experience running a multi-city editorial operation and shaping cultural coverage for an urban Indian readership.

Co-Founding Scroll.in

Scroll.in was launched in January 2014, founded by Samir Patil — a Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumnus and McKinsey associate who had previously built and sold ACK Media, publishers of the beloved Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle comics — alongside Fernandes and Jennifer O'Brien. Fernandes became editor-in-chief from the publication's founding. The early funding structure was notably aligned with independent journalism values: seed investment came from the IPS Media Foundation, the Media Development Investment Fund, and the Omidyar Network — backers committed to independent, public-interest media rather than returns-driven commercial publishing. Atlantic Media partnered with Scroll in June 2014 to launch the Indian edition of Quartz, and the Hindi-language Satyagrah was subsequently merged into Scroll as its Hindi edition. In March 2018, Scroll introduced a partial subscription model offering an ad-free experience and archive access to paying members, while Fernandes made clear publicly that the publication would not erect a paywall — an important commitment in the Indian context, where broad digital access to quality journalism remains a contested and economically fraught question.

Under Fernandes's editorial leadership, Scroll.in has consistently occupied an unusual position in India's increasingly pressured press landscape: independent of both large corporate ownership and government favour, explicitly committed to accountability journalism, and willing to publish reporting and commentary that navigates the complex terrain of Indian politics, religion, social justice, and civil liberties at a time when such journalism has become materially harder and more dangerous. Scroll's journalists have won Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards, Red Ink Awards for Excellence in Journalism, and WAN-IFRA South Asian Digital Media Awards. Fernandes himself describes his editorial role with characteristic self-deprecation — he has written of being haunted by "the ghosts of typos past and future" — but the publication reflects a consistent editorial vision: rigorous, readable, and unwilling to mistake access for independence.

Books and Cultural Scholarship

In parallel with his editorial career, Fernandes has developed a body of writing about Bombay — its history, culture, urban contradictions, and the music that shaped it — that stands independently of his journalism.

• Bombay Meri JaanCo-edited with Jerry Pinto · Penguin, 2003 · An anthology of writing about Bombay drawn from across genres and decades, one of the first significant literary collections devoted to the city as a subject

• Bombay: Then and NowCo-authored with photographer · Roli Books, 2009 · A photo-led comparative record of Bombay's historical and contemporary concerns, placing archival images alongside contemporary documentation of the same sites and communities

• Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay's Jazz AgeRoli Books, 2012 (updated edition 2024) · Shortlisted for the Economist Crossword Book Award (non-fiction) and the Tata First Book Award · Written during a Poiesis Fellowship at the NYU Institute of Public Knowledge · A richly researched cultural history of Bombay's jazz scene from the 1930s to the 1960s, tracing the musicians — many of them Goan Catholics, Anglo-Indians, and Jewish bandleaders — who gave the city its distinctive cosmopolitan musical character, and the clubs, hotels, and audiences that sustained them through independence and into the modern era. An active blog at tajmahalfoxtrot.com continues to publish archival discoveries and correspondence arising from the research

• City Adrift: A Short Biography of BombayAleph Book Company, 2013 · A compact, passionate urban history and lament — tracing Bombay's origins as a dowry gift through its centuries as a heterogeneous, cosmopolitan manufacturing and cultural capital, and diagnosing the forces — luxury real estate, political sectarianism, the decline of the textile industry, and the violence of 1992–93 — that have eroded its historical character

Current Activities

Fernandes continues as editor of Scroll.in, which remains one of the most prominent independent digital news platforms in India, with a readership that spans English-language India and a significant diaspora audience internationally. He remains a consulting editor at National Geographic Traveller India. His Taj Mahal Foxtrot blog at tajmahalfoxtrot.com remains actively updated with archival material, correspondence from readers, and new discoveries from his ongoing research into Bombay's musical history — a project that has clearly outgrown its original book form into something closer to a living archive. In January 2025 he participated in Sree Sreenivasan's Sunday ScrollReadalong — an online public event that gave international audiences a guided introduction to Scroll.in's journalism and to Fernandes's perspective on the state of Indian digital media. He has been a regular speaker at literary festivals, journalism conferences, and academic institutions, and has presented at Brandeis University, the Jaipur Literary Festival, and various NDTV and print media forums.

Naresh Fernandes
Editor and Co-Founder, Scroll.in
Mumbai (Bombay), Maharashtra, India

Scroll.in: scroll.in  |  Author page: scroll.in/author/348