Reporter Honored for Murder Coverage

A Hartford Courant reporter recently received an award from the Nieman Foundation for his coverage of the murder of a Yale University senior in 1998.

In a ceremony at the Harvard Faculty Club last Thursday, Les Gura was given the first-ever Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers, which consists of a $10,000 prize.

Established a year ago by the family that had formerly owned the Boston Globe, the prize is administered by the Neiman Foundation for Journalism. It aims to publicize issues of journalistic integrity.

According to Bob Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation, the recipient of the award “drew no conclusions but required the reader to think about the circumstances and make his and her own judgements.”

Gura was the sole recipient of the cash prize, although the award also honored finalists from the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, who each received a certificate of recognition and participated in a Faculty Club panel on unbiased reporting.

Gura’s story, published last April, examined how newspapers had not sufficiently questioned evidence implicating James Van de Velde, the Yale student’s thesis advisor, as a possible suspect.

While the murder remains unsolved and Van de Velde was never officially charged, he lost his teaching position at Yale after the publicity surrounding the murder.

The story was solicited by Van de Velde himself. He had been a student in a graduate journalism course Gura taught at Quinnipiac College and e-mailed Gura two years after the murder to request that the reporter evaluate his case.

“He reached out to me because he knew me,” said Gura. “It was almost like a challenge, challenging his former teacher to live up to what he taught the students.”

Gura criticized the coverage of the murder at the time.

“The story needed to be told with everyone quoted on the record, it had to put away the rumors in the media,” he said. “In the course of doing that, it shows that the person named as a suspect was treated wrongly by the police, Yale and the media and quite likely did not do it.”

Seth Effron, deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation, praised Gura’s reporting.

“Gura took into consideration the impact that newspaper reporting can have when journalists in a rush for a breaking story don’t give enough consideration to fairness,” Effron said. “People just wanted to find a way to clear this awful murder and say that we have a suspect.”

Gura was selected for the award by a panel of 35 journalists with interests in newspaper fairness and credibility. A panel of five judges then reviewed the nominations.