Our Next West Africa Correspondent Is Elian Peltier

When Notre-Dame burst into flames in 2019, The New York Times broke scoop after scoop revealing the failures that allowed the fire to spread quickly and the dangers left behind for residents of Paris.

Our secret weapon: Elian Peltier.

Elian, a reporter-researcher in our Paris bureau at the time, so fully established himself as a relentless investigative reporter and scoop artist that we promoted him to a reporting role in London.

And now, Elian is taking his next step in growing his career at The Times: He recently started in his new role as a West Africa correspondent based in Dakar, Senegal, where he will work closely with the bureau chief, Ruth MacLean.

“Elian has been a revelation in every job that we’ve asked him to do,” said Europe Editor Jim Yardley. “He was the driving force of our remarkable coverage of the Notre-Dame fire, a terrific news reporter in London and sub in Brussels. I can’t wait to see what he does in Africa.”

Elian started at The Times as an intern in the Paris bureau in 2015 in the midst of the worst series of terrorist attacks in France in decades. He said it “was a crash course in reporting breaking news for The New York Times as part of a large team, but also in storytelling.”

In 2017, he became a full-time reporter/researcher and in addition to jumping on breaking news, he carved out a new area of coverage — racism and social issues in sports, producing articles like one on racism in amateur soccer that told the often painful back story of Europe’s favorite sport.

In 2019, Elian joined the London newsroom as a breaking news reporter, where on his second day, he rushed to southern England to cover the grim discovery of 39 dead migrants in a truck. Months later, he headed to Spain to document one of the deadliest waves of the pandemic in Europe. He later spent time running the live coronavirus briefing from London, taking turns with editors to assign, edit and publish news items on the pandemic. Last year, Elian covered the European Union from Brussels, writing about the threats to rule of law and migration.

He remained drawn to the lives and hardship faced by immigrants and went to Denmark to report on Syrian refugees, highlighting the double standard that European countries apply to asylum seekers.

Elian is not a stranger to Africa: He worked with Ruth on various news stories in the region over the years, and in Brussels he told the story of five Congolese women who sued Belgium for the segregationist policy that removed them from their mothers under colonial rule in Congo.

A native of the Parisian area, Elian studied at the Missouri School of Journalism and has a dual master’s degree in journalism and international security from Sciences Po Paris. He will keep some ties with London, working with our editors there.

Elian speaks English, French, Spanish and is studying Arabic, when he isn’t running marathons.

Please congratulate him.

— Michael, Laurie, and Greg