Robert Giles
bob_giles@harvard.edu
Robert H. Giles is Curator of the Nieman Foundation. He worked for nearly 40 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, most recently as editor and publisher of The Detroit News, which he joined in 1986 as executive editor. From 1977-1986, Giles was executive editor and then editor at the Democrat & Chronicle and the Times-Union, in Rochester, N.Y. His newspaper career began in 1958 at the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, where he held several reporting and editing positions before becoming managing editor and then executive editor.
As managing editor of the Beacon Journal, Giles directed coverage of the campus shootings at Kent State University, for which the newspaper was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Before coming to Harvard in 2000, he was a senior vice president of the Freedom Forum and executive director of its Media Studies Center in New York City.
Giles is a graduate of DePauw University and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He was a Nieman Fellow in 1966. He received an honorary Doctorate in Journalism from DePauw in 1996.
|
Contributions
Transparency benefits the practice of journalism
COMMENTARY | May 01, 2004
'The Nieman Watchdog Project ... is grounded in the belief that probing questions are essential to informed reporting' 
Nieman Foundation to offer global health fellowships
SHOWCASE | January 30, 2006
Curator Bob Giles describes pilot program that will run for the next 3 years; funding is by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and work includes four months in a developing country after a year at Harvard.
‘The emerging mind of community journalism’
COMMENTARY | April 14, 2006
Participants at an Alabama session on community papers (circulation under 50,000) focus on leaving aloofness behind and connecting with readers in a personal way.
Giles urges TV reporters to ask tougher questions
COMMENTARY | January 12, 2007
TV has an edge over print in that it can take viewers along for the interview. But too often, writes the Nieman Foundation curator, American TV reporters accept evasive, reluctant answers without pressing for more. Why not follow the British model of tough interviewing?
A new I.F. Stone medal
SHOWCASE | March 05, 2008
As part of its watchdog journalism commitment, the Nieman Foundation is establishing an annual award in recognition of journalistic independence and brave, provocative reporting.
Bob Giles on the U.S. refusal to allow entry to a Nieman Fellow
COMMENTARY | July 15, 2010
In the 60 years since international journalists have been awarded Nieman fellowships, Hollman Morris of Colombia is the first to be denied entry to the United States by our government. Nieman curator Giles says that if the denial holds, it would an alarming, major recasting of the doctrine of press freedom – opening journalists to charges of terrorist activities because they established contacts with and reported on terrorist organizations.
|
If voters are to go into the midterm elections with any understanding at all, the press needs to get away from he-said, she-said reporting and look into the positions that candidates and the two parties are taking. Martin Lobel offers some vital questions. 
Our correspondent in Australia has ideas on how to improve things a little. But he’s not optimistic that anyone on Capitol Hill will be interested.
Columnist and author Steven Greenhut looks at the ongoing pension issue, including abuses of it, and deals with some of the key questions.
|
Cleaning up in the wake of the 2010 Iowa State Fair will be daunting this year. In addition to the mess left by nearly 1 million visitors and thousands of farm animals, we have a continuing saga of news coverage that told of possible racial assaults and then, in Saturday Night Live fashion, appears [...] 
(Editor’s note: The incidents described here have become part of a developing story, as this Google link shows.)
The Des Moines Register’s reluctance to identify criminal suspects or victims by race has turned into an outright refusal to do so.
The closing night of the Iowa State Fair was marked by an observance not exactly on the [...]
I got this note from a friend and colleague a little while after Roger Clemens was indicted by a federal grand jury on Aug. 19th:
“And meanwhile, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, CIA officials and others who lied to Congress in sworn testimony about Iraq go free. If we can ‘look forward, not backward’ on torture, perjury, [...]
Blog main page >>
|
| Leading journalism sites, blogs... |
|
|
|
TWITTER
Follow Nieman Watchdog on Twitter.
(Nieman Watchdog)
Telecoms charging more to do nothing
It's getting more expensive to have an unlisted phone number. What's the logic behind that?
(Center for Media and Democracy)
Prosecute those leaks
The Obama administration has indicted another alleged leaker, this time for reportedly passing along to Fox News an intelligence assessment that North Korea was likely to respond to U.N. sanctions by conducting another nuclear test.
(Secrecy News/Federation of American Scientists)
A broad array of massive financial crimes
As PRWatch.org shows, court-imposed settlements have only skimmed the surface of big banks' wrongdoing in the financial crisis.
(Center for Media and Democracy)
More Spotlights >>
|
 |
