In 2014, Yardley won the George Polk Award for foreign reporting and the Gerald Loeb Award for Breaking News for a series of articles on unsafe work conditions in the garment industry in Bangladesh and the collapse of a factory building that killed more than 1,100 workers.

In 2007, a three-part article by Jim Yardley, “Crisis on the Yellow River” — published in three parts in the Asia edition of the International Herald Tribune — won the Society of Publishers in Asia award for explanatory reporting.

In 2006, Yardley and his colleague, Times Beijing bureau chief Joseph Kahn, won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, for a series of eight articles on the “ragged justice in China as the booming nation’s legal system evolves.”

Yardley is a graduate of Walter Hines Page High School in Greensboro, North Carolina and received a B.A. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, class of ’86. He joined the Times in 1997 and first worked as a metropolitan reporter in New York, and then became the bureau chief in Houston in 1999. His topics have included social unrest, minority uprisings, and pollution issues in China. He was the South Asia bureau chief based in New Delhi until 2013, when he moved to Rome and became the bureau chief there. After 13 years as a foreign correspondent, Yardley and his family moved to London where he now works as the Europe editor.

From 1990 to 1997, Yardley was a national desk reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, based in Atlanta, Birmingham and New Orleans.

James Barrett Yardley (born June 18, 1964) is an American journalist currently working in Rome.