Reporter's Notebook: Covering the China-Africa Story for the New York Times

Western news coverage of China's engagement in Africa is often confined to the business section, generally focusing on loans, resource deals or other financial dealings. Moreover, ambitious international feature reporting, particularly from Africa, has becoming increasingly rare in today's era of declining revenues at major international news outlets. So it was notable when the New York Times published an expansive front page story in the May 2, 2015 edition of the Sunday Magazine.

Shanghai-based journalist, and regular contributor to the NYT Sunday Magazine, Brook Larmer reported the story, Is China the World’s New Colonial Power?. Rather than look at the China-Africa from a broad, continental perspective, he instead chose to focus on the dynamics between the two players in one relatively small country. Brook joins Eric & Cobus to discuss how he approached the story and what it was like to cover the Chinese on the ground from Namibia.

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