Globe Family Endows Newspaper Award

The Taylor family, who for more than 125 years owned the Boston Globe, has endowed a new $10,000 annual award for fairness in newspaper writing to be administered by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard.

The founders of the award hope it will combat a growing opinion that newspapers do not treat the subjects of their stories fairly.

“The widespread perception that journalists periodically or even routinely deal from a stacked deck was one of the most troubling developments about newspaper work at the turn of the millennium,” wrote Globe columnist David Nyhan, in announcing the award in Neiman Reports, the Foundation’s quarterly magazine.

A “Fairness Award Jury” will select the recipient from nominations made by a panel of 31 distinguished journalists, including editors from the New York Times, Orlando Sentinel, Austin American Statesman and Los Angeles Times. The jury will consider all aspects of a story, including writing, reporting, design, headlines and photographs.

According to Nieman Curator Bob Giles there will not be any set “fairness” definition.

“The standards for fairness in journalism are complex and diverse and not easily defined for this kind of journalism competition,” he said.

The award will first be presented next year, based on reporting done this year.

Nyhan, who is a former fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Politics and the Press, said that many subjects of media coverage feel abused by the coverage and that such coverage helps build public cynicism towards what they read in newspapers. He decried a recent survey that found most Americans now believe that local television is the most reliable source of news.

“That’s finishing in a beauty contest behind a burro,” he wrote.

According to the award founders, newspapers need to take steps to appear more reliable and better clarify and correct published mistakes.

“A free press must also be a responsible press, and that means a press that is fair to both individuals and institutions in the news,” Globe Chair Emeritus William O. Taylor said in a press release. The Taylor family sold the Globe to the New York Times Company in 1993.

According to Bob Haiman, a former executive editor at the St. Petersburg Times, several recent improvements at national newspapers serve as proof that newspapers can improve, including a pilot program at the Chicago Tribune that tracked every error in the newspaper and the reason that they occurred. In five years, the paper was able to reduce mistakes by 50 percent.

He also suggested that other newspapers adopt the policy of the San Jose Mercury News, which allows subjects of stories to withdraw or revise a quote in certain circumstances. The rule does not apply to public figures, but to “naive, ordinary citizens who didn’t realize that what they said might get them fired, sued, divorced, etc.

“If journalists would only listen...to readers talk about the changes that would make them think the press is trying to be fair, much progress could be made,” Haiman wrote.

—Staff writer Garrett M. Graff can be reached at ggraff@fas.harvard.edu.