John Eligon was named Johannesburg Bureau Chief for the New York Times. Eligon had been working as a national correspondent covering race and inequality in the United States.

Eligon joined The Times in 2005 and spent his first two years on Sports before going to Metro, where he helped cover the trial of Brooke Astor’s son and the sexual assault investigation into Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

In 2012, he went to Kansas City to cover the Midwest and arrived in the middle of a drought. When Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 and the Black Lives Matter movement thrust issues of race and inequity to the front of the national conversation, his beat transitioned from covering the region to covering race in America.

“John is a brilliant and generous colleague who spots good stories everywhere,” said Jia Lynn Yang, the NYT National editor. “He has practically moved to Minneapolis to produce one powerful story after another on the reverberations of George Floyd’s killing. John’s stories are special, and readers of International are in for a real treat.”

Source: NYT announcement