Nieman Curator to Step Down

Bill Kovach, who has served as the curator of the Nieman Foundation since 1989, will resign his post effective next June, according to a letter he sent to the foundation's advisory board earlier this week.

The Nieman Foundation brings 24 professional journalists from around the nation and the world to Cambridge each year. Kovach came to Harvard as a Nieman Fellow in 1988-89 from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and stayed on as the foundation's curator.

Ten years later, Kovach, who is 67, said he feels it is time to move on, citing his desire to spend more time with his family. He also said the foundation would benefit from a curator who is more familiar with the rapidly expanding field of communications technology.

Kovach called the instant communication of information and images the single greatest change to affect the journalistic world in the last 10 years. According to Kovach, this technology has had and will continue to have "an extraordinary...and unknowable impact on the practice of journalism."

"Just as Gutenberg's press disoriented the world back then," Kovach said, this technology is "disorienting the world now."

He expressed his feeling that no matter how hard he tries to keep up with the times, his 10 years away from the newsroom have left him out of touch. The Nieman Foundation, he wrote in his letter to the advisory board, is ready for "an upgrade."

Kovach, who is also the ombudsperson for Brill's Content magazine, plans to spend more time with his family--his wife Lynne, his four children, and his six grandchildren--and to dedicate time to writing. He is in the process of co-authoring a book with Tom Rosenstiel that bears the working title, The Elements of Journalism.

Kovach also has a contract to write a memoir about his experience at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he was an editor for two years before resigning due to a dispute with the newspaper's owners.

Kovach's job in Atlanta was merely one stop in a distinguished career. He began reporting in 1959 at the Johnson City Press Chronicle in Tennessee and spent much of the 1960s covering the civil rights movement, Appalachian poverty and southern politics for the Nashville Tennesseean.

In 1968, Kovach went to work for The New York Times, where he remained for 18 years, ultimately serving as Washington bureau chief.

In 1986, Kovach left The Times for Atlanta, where the Journal-Constitution won two Pulitzer Prizes under his leadership. But he left Atlanta in favor of Cambridge in 1988 after being denied what he felt to be sufficient editorial independence.

He leaves his post at the Nieman Foundation with none of those bad feelings.

"At this job, I had the opportunity to do things I had not dreamed of," Kovach said.

He said he was "fortunate enough to be in this position when the Cold War ended and the [Berlin] Wall came down."

Kovach capitalized on these historic changes by bringing more international journalists to Harvard and helping to encourage a free press in countries throughout Eastern Europe and Latin America. These accomplishments, he said, were his proudest achievements.

Kovach did not comment specifically on Harvard President Neil L. Rudenstine's upcoming choice of a new curator, except to say that he hopes his replacement will be "a quality journalist with crystal-clear values."

To be a journalist in a free society, suggested Kovach, is to have "one of the most important jobs that a person can do in this world."

The civic duty of a journalist, he said, is "more important than celebrity, salary, bottom-line pressures, or technological pressures."