After four years of covering South Asia, New York Times Delhi bureau chief Somini Sengupta is set to leave her post in a few months, making way for Pulitzer Prize-winner Jim Yardley, who shuffles over from the Beijing bureau. The moves are part of a major re-ordering of the paper's foreign bureaus. From a note sent out by Times Foreign Editor Susan Chira (reproduced in full below):
After four productive, hectic years covering an exploding story in India and the region, Somini Sengupta will be leaving New Delhi and moving with her husband to Amsterdam, where he is taking up an exciting new job running Doctors without Borders operations in the Netherlands. Somini has flung herself around the region from India to Pakistan to Nepal to Sri Lanka, infusing each story with her elegant prose, eye for detail and passion for social issues. Somini's series about water use shows how to combine coverage of big challenges for India with an intimate look at their concrete effect on real lives. When her husband's job winds down, we'll be able to discuss future assignments.
Yardley will be part of an expanding Delhi bureau (amazingly enough, given the shrinking state of newsrooms) that will also include West Africa correspondent Lydia Polgreen. She sent us this note from Dakar:
I am incredibly excited. India is an extraordinary story, and now is a great time to be covering it. I think Jim Yardley and I will bring really different perspectives on India coming from two different directions, China and Africa, which is great. My experiences covering the remarkable struggle of Africans and their leaders to pull the continent into the 21st century will surely inform my coverage of India, which has made it much further along that path but faces many more struggles along the way. But India is a story unlike any other, so I will approach it as so many millions have over the ages: As a humble, inquisitive seeker of knowledge about this vast and fascinating civilization. It is also really great that we'll be expanding our presence in India. It is a testament to how important the story is that even at this time of uncertainty in our business the Times is doubling down on India. I am hoping to make the move early next year.
More on Yardley and Polgreen, from Chira's note:
Jim's work in China has helped set a standard in how to conceptualize, report, and write a narrative-based series. And in the last year, as China became an urgent news story as well as a fertile source of grand themes, Jim worked nearly around the clock, collaborating on groundbreaking stories about the Olympics, the Sichuan earthquake, the uproar over Tibet, the burgeoning food and quality scandals, and much more. Michael Wines and Sharon LaFraniere, as previously announced, will replace Jim in Beijing. They have been in language training this year.
And further down:
For years, we have been wanting to expand the number of reporters we assign to India, given its growing importance as a regional and economic powerhouse, and we were finally able to manage another Delhi slot. Lydia will be ending a distinguished tour of West Africa, where she brought her incisive mind, fresh eye, and a willingness to trek pretty much to the ends of the earth -- through jungles, into mines, with rebels, you name it -- to get to the story. She has won widespread admiration for her coverage of Sudan and Darfur, where she managed to take well-trodden ground and consistently break new stories, deepening our understanding of the complexity of the conflict. Her refusal to accept easy categorizations has defined her entire coverage of Africa.
Somini told us she'd be leaving Delhi in the spring, at which point she'll be able to give us the low-down on her four-year stint, and what Laloo Yadav is like when he can't get his paan. By the way, this announcement comes almost exactly four years after the Times decided to post her in Delhi. From a piece yours truly wrote for Rediff, in 2004, which notes that earlier Delhi bureau chiefs included AM "Abe" Rosenthal and Joseph Lelyveld, both of whom went on to become executive editors at the paper. From "First Indian to run New York Times' Delhi bureau":
"Ms Sengupta will take up her position sometime in early 2005," Foreign Editor Susan Chira told rediff.com. Chira acknowledged that no other Indian reporter had run the Delhi bureau, but said "there is no conscious plan for this."
"She is a superb reporter who is eminently qualified and wanted the position and earned it," she said.She added that David Rohde and Amy Waldman, who currently cover South Asia, would be leaving the region.
Sengupta's move to Delhi was a big deal, because it came just as India was becoming a major player. And, even if the NYT denied her ethnicity was related to the post, the fact that she landed the position was seen as yet another confirmation, I think, of India's global talent pool, not just in the sciences and engineering and finance, but in the media as well. And it suggested that the Times was especially serious about staffing the post.
During the 2007 SAJA Convention, SAJAforum contributor Sadia Latifi asked Bill Keller, the NYT's executive editor a question about pairing journalists with the country their family comes from:
Q: Many Times reporters, including Salman Masood (Pakistan), Somini Sengupta (India), Choe Sang-Hung (Korea), Anand Giridharadas (India), and Norimitsu Onishi (Japan), are currently covering their countries of origin. Is this a growing phenomenon? What are the advantages and disadvantages of having reporters cover their homeland?
Keller: I don’t think it’s a trend. Somini is not in India because she's Indian, she's in India because it was where she wanted to go. She distinguished herself in West Africa as a correspondent. There are lots of pluses and minuses. The pluses can sometimes be language, sometimes understanding subtleties of story in a way that another reporter might not catch. I expect Somini runs into complications when she is in Pakistan because there's some assumption that she's carrying water for the Indian government. We don't go out of our way to match people ethnically to their stories.
Sengupta is not the only correspondent leaving their homeland. Norimitsu Onishi, described on his Wikipedia page as the "first highly-fluent Japanese speaking Tokyo bureau chief" for the Times, is leaving for Jakarta.
For more on Somini's rise from cocktail waitress to high-flying journalist, read the 2004 Rediff piece. And here's a link to all her work for the NYT.
Please leave comments on her work in South Asia, and any thoughts/suggestions you may have for her replacements, Jim Yardley and Lydia Polgreen.
EARLIER ON SAJAforum: Advice for American journalists going to South Asia for the first time
SUSAN CHIRA'S MEMO
We are pleased to announce a number of moves in foreign bureaus, and a
new opening.Jim Yardley, who has presided over an extraordinary run of stories in
his five -plus years in Beijing, will become the New Delhi bureau
chief. Jim's work in China has helped set a standard in how to
conceptualize, report, and write a narrative-based series. And in the
last year, as China became an urgent news story as well as a fertile
source of grand themes, Jim worked nearly around the clock,
collaborating on groundbreaking stories about the Olympics, the
Sichuan earthquake, the uproar over Tibet, the burgeoning
food and quality scandals, and much more.
Michael Wines and Sharon LaFraniere, as previously announced, will
replace Jim in Beijing. They have been in language training this year.Andrew Jacobs, whom we recruited to help us cover the press of news as
the earthquake toll mounted and the Olympics loomed in China, will
shortly become a permanent Beijing correspondent. Andrew's sparkling
writing and enterprising reporting, combined with his knowledge of
Chinese, have already produced a string of memorable stories. Among
them are his analytical comparison of China's response to the Sichuan
earthquake with Myamar's initial refusal of foreign help and his
evocative look at two elderly women caught up in the security
crackdown
during the Olympics. We look forward to many more.After four productive, hectic years covering an exploding story in
India and the region, Somini Sengupta will be leaving New Delhi and
moving with her husband to Amsterdam, where he is taking up an
exciting new job running Doctors without Borders operations in the
Netherlands. Somini has flung herself around the region from India to
Pakistan to Nepal to Sri Lanka, infusing each story with her elegant
prose, eye for detail and passion for social issues. Somini's series
about water use shows how to combine coverage of big challenges for
India with an intimate look at their concrete effect on real lives.
When her husband's job winds down, we'll be able to discuss future
assignments.Jim Yardley will be joined in New Delhi by Lydia Polgreen. For years,
we have been wanting to expand the number of reporters we assign to
India, given its growing importance as a regional and economic
powerhouse, and we were finally able to manage another Delhi slot.
Lydia will be ending a distinguished tour of West Africa, where she
brought her incisive mind, fresh eye, and a willingness to trek pretty
much to the ends of the earth -- through jungles, into mines, with
rebels, you name it -- to get to the story. She has won widespread
admiration for her coverage of Sudan and Darfur, where she managed to
take well-trodden ground and consistently break new stories, deepening
our
understanding of the complexity of the conflict. Her refusal to accept easy
categorizations has defined her entire
coverage of Africa.Lydia's departure opens the job of West Africa bureau chief; please
consider this as a posting and contact one of us if you are
interested. We are working on the exact timing for her move but it
should be in the first quarter of next year.Nori Onishi is leaving Tokyo after five years for Jakarta, where we
expect he will continue to unearth stories that somehow no one else
has seen in quite the same way. Nori's coverage of both Japan and
Korea has been wholly original. He has pushed beneath the
cherry-blossom stereotypes to reval a darker side of Japan in his
dispatches on the right wing movement in Japanese politics. He has also cast
a sympathetic
eye on many aspects of Japanese life, such as the challenges of aging.
He
has ranged from a penetrating look at North Koreans being smuggled out of
the country to a poignant account of the trials and hopes of Southeast Asian
brides married off to Korean farmers. He
will be working closely with our IHT colleagues in Bangkok, Seth
Mydans and Tom Fuller, and will begin his new assignment this winter.Martin Fackler, who has worked alongside Nori in Tokyo as a Bizday
correspondent, will become bureau chief. Martin brings fluency in
Japanese and Japanese politics and society to this post. He began his
journalism career in 1996 as a Tokyo correspondent for Bloomberg, then
moved to the A.P. in Tokyo and later to Beijing -- the other society
and language he knows intimately. He returned to Japan in 2003 with
the Wall Street Journal until Larry Ingrassia presciently lured him to
the Times in 2005 to cover business news. Martin's deep knowledge of
Japan and avid interest in Korea promises insightful coverage of the
region, in collaboration with Choe Sang-hun, our IHT colleague in Seoul.Susan, Joe, Ian
