NYT moves Beijing bureau chief to India

New York, Oct 23 (IANS) The New York Times is moving its Beijing bureau chief Jim Yardley to India, replacing Somini Sengupta as the bureau chief in New Delhi.

The Times' Olympics reporting this year under Yardley won fulsome praise from the paper's executive editor Bill Keller as 'stunning' and 'dazzling' in internal memos, The New York Observer, a weekly newspaper, has reported.

During his five years in Beijing, Yardley also won a Pulitzer in international reporting in 2006.

Sengupta, who spent four years as the New Delhi bureau chief, will take a temporary sabbatical in the Netherlands before getting a new assignment.

In a reshuffle at the Times foreign desk, Yardley will be joined in India by Lydia Polgreen, currently the paper's West African correspondent.

At a time when US newspapers are shutting or trimming their foreign bureaus to cut costs, the Times is not ready to sacrifice its foreign reporting edge.

NYT's foreign editor Susan Chira told the Observer: 'Luckily, the top management of the Times sees foreign news as essential to the identity and mission of the Times. So while we are careful to pare costs whenever we can, and while we have had to juggle bureau positions so we don't go up overall, we are in the fortunate position of avoiding major cuts.'