E-Mail This Article to a Friend Surprise at Harvard Far from being a status-quo placeholder, Nieman curator Bob Giles has proved to be a controversial activist BY MARK JURKOWITZ
	Fine-arts fracas Bill Koch faces off with the Globe, ponders libel suit Boston loves a good public battle and there’s a big one shaping involving the media, arts, and legal communities. In one corner stands Bill Koch, the multimillionaire (maybe billionaire) businessman, art lover, and headline-maker whose collection of valuables — including racing boats — makes up the "Things I Love: The Many Collections of William I. Koch" exhibit currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts. In the other corner stands the powerful Boston Globe and, more specifically, its smart, sarcastic, sharp-elbowed columnist Alex Beam. The third man in the ring is Howard Cooper, the Boston lawyer who defied the odds by winning a $2.1 million libel award against the Herald for Judge Ernest Murphy this year and who has suddenly become the barrister of choice for potential libel litigants willing to do battle with big media outlets — Koch now included. Through Cooper, Koch — who compared himself to a "snarling badger" in a Phoenix interview — has demanded an apology and a retraction for an August 9 Beam column revisiting some of Koch’s earlier legal entanglements, which he described as "unprovoked" and "malicious." In a September 9 letter to Beam, Cooper raised the specter of litigation by describing the column as nothing short of "libel." As of the Phoenix’s deadline, Beam and Globe editor Marty Baron both declined comment on the controversy, and executives at the Globe’s parent New York Times Company were said to be reviewing Cooper’s letter. Click here for a complete account of the controversy, as well as a look at Cooper’s missive to Beam and Koch’s letter to Baron. - MJ

In a field that often measures success by awards and honors, the journalism profession’s annual Pulitzers stand atop the pantheon of prizes. But for veteran journalists, the chance to spend time away from the newsroom to mingle with other mid-career peers and become part of a distinguished lifelong fraternity is a much coveted and very competitive opportunity. Although Stanford’s Knight Fellowships attract top media talent, the oldest and most prestigious fellowship is at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University.

Bob Giles’s selection in July 2000 to the become the seventh Nieman curator since 1938 was less than auspicious. A number of other candidates were considered before his name came up, including former Baltimore Sun editor John Carroll, who was set to take the job before being suddenly lured away by the Los Angeles Times.

A former Detroit News editor and publisher, Giles’s ascension was marred by a vigorous lobbying campaign against him by union members and journalists critical of his role during the Detroit newspaper strike. When he finally got the Nieman appointment, Giles succeeded an icon, Bill Kovach, the widely respected former Atlanta Journal-Constitution editor who had used the post as a bully pulpit. Compared with Kovach, the low-key, soft-spoken Giles is charismatically challenged and considerably less of a public player on the national media scene.

So when he got to Cambridge, the conventional wisdom was that Giles, now 72, was a short-term selection, a grateful placeholder who would finish out his career at the foundation without rocking the boat, raising hackles, or fashioning a memorable legacy.

To borrow a famous malapropism from George W. Bush, he was badly "misunderestimated."

Five years into the job, Giles shows no signs of leaving. With a new class of Nieman fellows having just arrived, he has proved to be an activist curator — even a revolutionary one — at once decisive and divisive. He has built a controversial $4 million, 3500-square-foot addition to the Nieman program’s Lippmann House headquarters, which has required a capital campaign. He created an ambitious narrative-journalism program that includes an annual conference that attracts 1000 participants, developed a series of smaller seminars, established an events team for such occasions, and reshuffled the staff. Giles hired the first-ever deputy Nieman curator (Seth Effron, who has since left) and appointed an official board of advisers. This spring, he announced that the foundation would help train Chinese officials to interact with the media during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, an initiative that sparked a backlash intense enough to force its cancellation.

Giles’s tenure has triggered a fierce debate between those who say his innovations represent a detour from the core goal of tending to each year’s two dozen Nieman fellows and those who believe he has enriched the foundation and expanded its reach without diminishing the fellows’ experience.

Alex Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center and a member of the Nieman board of advisors, says: "I don’t think that it has damaged the essential core [of the program]. But he has been revolutionary in that he has transformed the bricks-and-mortar headquarters and has also greatly expanded the idea of what the Nieman program is."

"He’s has got such a restrained and low-keyed style when you first meet him," says Richard Chacon, Boston Globe ombudsman and a member of last year’s Nieman class. "You really are just amazed at how much he has accomplished, whether you agree with him or not."

Giles, himself a 1965-66 Nieman fellow, makes it clear that — agree with him or not — he is not finished putting his stamp on the institution.

"One of the things that I guess wasn’t widely known about me was I like to change things," Giles says.

"I have a lot more I want to do," he asserts before hastily adding a few words clearly intended to soothe his critics. "Not to change the place, just to make the program better."

NOT-SO-HAPPY REUNION

Many of the simmering tensions about Giles’s stewardship came to a head on the morning of May 8, 2005 in a discussion during a reunion of Nieman fellows. During that session, Giles confirmed the foundation was involved in the Chinese Olympics program — an effort detractors saw as an attempt to teach officials from a nation with a poor track record on press freedom how to handle the international media and as another deviation from the Nieman mission.

In a piece she wrote for the Poynter Institute headlined "Family Feud at Nieman Reunion," Nieman alum Molly Sinclair McCartney explained that the reunions are "normally a love feast." But she described what ensued that day as "a contentious face-off with many Nieman alumni expressing alarm and dismay and Giles standing calm and firm."

"The room lit up," recalls Giles, describing the intense reunion dustup. The furor over the China program and Giles’s vision for the foundation quickly became a national story. (In early February, the Boston Globe had written a page-one story about growing "unrest about the foundation’s direction.") The 2005 class of Nieman fellows, who were supportive of Giles, responded to McCartney’s story with a letter lauding him and declaring that "our Nieman year has been fantastic, surpassing our expectation."

Less than a week after that showdown, the foundation announced it was withdrawing from the China program. A crucial meeting Giles had with the 2005 Niemans — who raised some objections to the idea — played a significant role in that decision.

"All of them said ‘this is going to hurt you and we don’t want to see that happen. And this is going to hurt the program,’ " Giles recounts. Nonetheless, he says, "I still think it’s a good idea," and claims critics "misinterpreted" the intent of the initiative.

Typical of the varying views about Giles are the dueling perspectives of the Globe’s Chacon and Murray Seeger, a writer and member of the class of 1961-62.

Seeger, an original opponent of Giles’s selection as curator, is critical of the foundation’s recent direction. "The whole idea of it was to take journalists out of their work for a year and turn them loose on Harvard," he says. "Don’t divert the program into various extraneous things."

"Bob has quietly managed to transform the foundation, whether it’s the [new] wing or the much more outward presence the foundation has," says Chacon. "I don’t know what the fellowship was like in that old, for want of a better word, cloistered experience. I think it just adds to the experience."

QUICK DECISIONS

Sitting around a circular table in a room that connects to his Lippmann House office, Giles — in his phlegmatic, unflappable style — says he understands the Nieman alums’ enduring interest in events in Cambridge.

"I deeply respect the loyalty and commitment and passion that Niemans from the past have for this program," he says. And he insists he is committed to its essential purpose, which he defines as "a year of study and reflection at Harvard for the Nieman fellows."

But Giles also acknowledges that the ambitious addition to the Lippmann house "came to symbolize ... my strong belief that the Nieman Foundation needed to share the resources of Harvard with the world of journalism more broadly. This is a very elite program.... I thought it would be a good use of our facilities and brand."

Aside from the question of whether Giles has done too much empire-building, another criticism is that he tends to be a solitary decision-maker who doesn’t seek consensus. In response to McCartney’s "Family Feud" story, Nieman alum Kenneth Freed posted a message complaining of Giles’s "autocratic, even secret, way of doing things."

In response, Giles calls himself "an effective delegator" and says that, for example, he discussed the China initiative with a group of five journalists before signing on. But the quiet man who defied the predictions about the length and nature of his tenure at Lippmann House makes no bones about who calls the shots.

"I was a Nieman fellow and because I have a lot faith in my ideas, I can be pretty directive in that regard," he adds. "And I can make decisions pretty quickly."

Mark Jurkowitz can be reached at mjurkowitz[a]phx.com.