Shantanu David is a journalist who writes about technology, media, culture, and the strange economics of the internet, which increasingly seems to run on advertising, algorithms, and vibes. His work sits somewhere at the intersection of platforms, artificial intelligence, digital media, cultural change, and the business models that quietly shape how we read, watch, buy, and argue online.

He began his journalism career with The Indian Express in 2011 as their food correspondent in Delhi, which meant eating for a living; writing about restaurants, culinary history, and food trends; and occasionally having very strong opinions about butter chicken. He also wrote the newspaper’s weekly food review and spent a large amount of time thinking about menus, chefs, and why some restaurants survive while others disappear in six months.

At some point, his editors decided he should expand beyond food, which led to writing about music and books. This meant attending concerts and music festivals, reviewing albums and books, interviewing authors, and occasionally writing travel pieces. He was fortunate enough to be given a fairly high degree of independence, which allowed him to pursue stories that interested him and slowly become a generalist feature writer rather than someone locked into a single beat.

After six extremely enjoyable years at The Indian Express, he decided to step out of print journalism and move into digital media, partly out of curiosity and partly because the entire media industry was clearly moving online whether anyone liked it or not. In 2017, he joined the lifestyle section of News18.com, the online platform of CNN-News18, CNN’s India affiliate.

In what felt like career déjà vu, his repertoire expanded again. He moved from food and lifestyle writing into film, culture, social media trends, climate change, popular science, and technology. Working in digital media also meant learning how online newsrooms actually function, including working with news desks, SEO teams, and social media managers to ensure stories reached as many readers as possible and did not disappear quietly into the internet void.

During this time, he also worked with the main news desks and remotely covered several major national and global events, including the 2019 Indian general elections, the Indian budget, the Donald Trump–Kim Jong-un summits, and the 2018 Royal Wedding, which together probably represent one of the stranger combinations of stories a journalist can cover in a few years.

Over time, his interests increasingly shifted toward technology, media, platforms, and the economics of the internet. He became particularly interested in how digital advertising funds most of the internet, how platforms control distribution, how algorithms shape visibility, and how artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape creative and knowledge work. Much of his current writing focuses on the business of the internet: digital advertising, streaming platforms, creator ecosystems, platform regulation, artificial intelligence, and the future of media.

He is especially interested in how global technology platforms interact with emerging markets like India, where scale, infrastructure, regulation, and price sensitivity create very different outcomes from Western markets. Many of his stories try to explain complex systems such as adtech infrastructure, platform business models, AI economics, and digital regulation in clear, readable language, because many of the systems that shape modern life are both extremely important and extremely poorly understood.

Having spent years in both print and digital newsrooms, he is now increasingly interested in independent writing, new media models, and the idea that the internet is slowly changing what it means to be a journalist, writer, or publisher. He is particularly interested in writing for publications and platforms that sit somewhere between journalism, essays, analysis, and long-form writing.

His areas of interest include technology, artificial intelligence, science, space exploration, media, platform economics, cultural and social trends, and the general question of how technology changes the way people live, work, and think. At a broader level, he is interested in systems, incentives, and power, and in explaining how large, invisible systems quietly shape everyday life.

If there is a common thread across everything he has written, from restaurant reviews to artificial intelligence, it is probably this: he is interested in how the world works, who benefits from the way it works, and why things are usually more complicated than they first appear. He is fortunate enough to write about the things he likes, and he likes writing, so it all works out.