Nieman Curator Bob Giles to retire

Bob Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard for the past decade, will retire at the end of the academic year in June 2011.

Giles, whose newspaper career began in 1958 at the Beacon Journal, was executive editor when he left in 1975. From 1977 to 1986 he was executive editor, then editor, of the Rochester, N.Y., Democrat & Chronicle and Times-Union. Giles then served for 11 years as executive editor, and, later, editor and publisher of The Detroit News. He was managng editor in 1971 when the Beacon Journal won the Pulitzer prize.

He was editor of The Detroit News when that newspaper won a Pulitzer in 1994 for the disclosures of a scandal in the Michigan House Fiscal Agency. Giles won the Scripps-Howard Foundation's Distinguished Journalism Citation in 1978 for "outstanding public service in the cause of the First Amendment" for columns that advocated more press coverage of courtroom proceedings. He is an eight-time Pulitzer Prize juror and is the author of Newsroom Management: A Guide to Theory and Practice.

“It is not easy to leave a great institution and the wonderful people who make it so, but this is a good time for my wife, Nancy, and me to begin a new chapter in our lives,” Giles, 77, said. “The Nieman program has grown significantly over the past decade and is sound financially. It continues to attract highly gifted, independent-minded journalists seeking a transformative experience at Harvard.

“For me, the privilege of serving as curator has been an extraordinarily rewarding period in a long life in journalism. It is time now for new leadership to build on what my colleagues and I have added to the program over the past decade,” Giles added.

Bill Wheatley, former executive vice president for NBC News and president of the Nieman Foundation Advisory Board, lauded Giles’ “superb contribution to the foundation’s vitality and reputation. During a period of great turbulence in journalism, he has positioned the Nieman Foundation for continued success in the years to come.”

Giles said that he and his wife, a psychologist, plan to stay in Cambridge, but eventually will move to Northern Michigan, where they have a home.

“My work with the fellows has deepened my desire to do what they do: take courses at Harvard, go to lectures and concerts, read,” he said. “I also can’t imagine not staying involved with journalism in some new way, especially now, when so much is possible and so much is at stake.”

Read the Nieman Foundation story.