Stop the Presses

The last thing James Bryant Conant wanted at Harvard was a school of journalism. A chemist at heart, Conant wrote his speeches in a manner designed to keep a reporter from finding any headlines in it. Consequently, the windfall bequest left to Harvard in 1936 by Agnes Wahl Nieman, widow of the founder of The Milwaukee Journal, came as a complete surprise to Harvard's President.

In fact, many people thought the Nieman choice of beneficiary rather odd. The Boston Globe noted that "Harvard not only had no hint that the Nieman millions were coming its way, but it was difficult to find anyone at Harvard who knew anything about the Milwaukee publishing family which left Harvard one of the largest legacies in its long history.

"It was a surprise, too," The Globe article continued, "to find Harvard--perhaps the only large university in the country which has no school of journalism, nor even a single course in journalism--receiving these millions 'to promote and elevate the standards of journalism.'"

Agnes Nieman's bequest gave Harvard's President and Fellows a virtual carte blanche in devising their own program to utilize the funds.

Out of its clear distaste for journalism academies and their trade school atmospheres, Harvard chose to meet the challenge in a unique and distinctive way.

Conant designated only that a selected group of journalists use the Nieman money to spend a year at Harvard with full access to University facilities. While young graduates left the College to discover the real world, journalists, who had perhaps seen enough of it, could take time to contemplate their discoveries. The Nieman Fellowships would serve as the unique bridge between the worlds of academia and of public affairs and journalism.

The program's success, according to Louis M. Lyons, a member of the first Nieman class and the Foundation's curator until 1964, lies in the "happy coincidence" that universities and newspapers are equally universal--one in the subjects it offers for study, the other in the events that it covers and studies daily.

From the beginning, Conant left the program to develop by itself. Lyons recalls that he usually never said more about it than, "It's going all right, isn't it? That's all I hear."

The extent of his interference with the program, in fact, was his deliberate choice of name and title for the new program: that it be called a foundation and that the person in charge of it be known as its curator. Conant evidently believed that there is a great deal in a name. In his mind, the story goes, the foundation--not department or institute--with a curator--not professor or dean--in charge neatly sidestepped the possibilities that 1) under a director the program might become an institute, 2) under a chairman a department would emerge, or 3) under a dean, Harvard might one day have a faculty of journalism.

The single decision to offer midcareer fellowships for journalists, a novel idea at the time, has translated into distinctive opportunities for newsmen and women and has led to new critiques of the profession.

After 35 years of existence, the Nieman Foundation can boast several Pulitzer Prize-winning alumni and many more top-notch reporters and media executives.

In addition, it has sparked many books and a quarterly magazine, The Nieman Reports (used almost exclusively by journalism schools), which were among the first publications to deal with the responsibilities of the press and the profession's internal problems. These subjects were not considered legitimate when the Nieman Fellowships began, Lyons notes, but have since "soaked in and been accepted" by the profession.

Thus, despite Conant's deliberate restraint, the program he did create has become an institution, albeit a loosely structured and highly individualistic one.

Essentially, the Nieman Foundation grants to 12 American journalists a leave of absence from their work and an academic year at Harvard. The Foundation pays each Neiman Fellow a weekly stipend (which is lower than the average weekly salary of $300 paid by most metropolitan dailies), as well as paying Harvard the full tuition for each.

The Foundation's only stipulations are that Fellows have at least three years' professional experience and be between 25 and 40 years old, that while here they fulfill the academic requirements in one semester course, and that they return to their previous employer upon leaving Cambridge.

In other words: a Nieman year can be anything that a journalist cares to make of it. James C. Thomson, whom President Bok appointed as Nieman Curator last Spring, says that "the doors to Harvard are remarkably open to us." Kevin Buckley, a current Nieman agrees: "We had a briefing in the Fall from representatives of all the Harvard schools," Buckley said. "Most of the briefings I've ever gone to have been to tell me what I can't do, but this one was different. We were told to get something for ourselves here. That message proved quite accurate."

Thomson says that the Nieman program consists of two tracks--one academic, and the other an "extracurricular" series of Nieman luncheons, dinners and beer and cheese seminars which bring the group together and provide a thread of continuity between academia and the world of reporting and public affairs.

Just in the one year following Thomson's appointment, the Nieman program has changed to a degree that former Niemans find "dramatic." They give the new curator high marks for having restored the program to its hard-drinking vitality. Many of the changes were obvious and long-overdue, they say, but they also note that they could not have occurred without the financial shot in the arm which Thomson's predecessor, Dwight E. Sargent, administered to the program.

This year for the first time, the Nieman Foundation has offered a "two for the price of one" option so that Nieman spouses can make as full use of Harvard's facilities and the special Nieman activities as the Fellows themselves. Towards this end, Thomson gives each Nieman family a certain allowance to cover baby-sitting and day-care costs. The experiment has worked well, Thomson says, and will probably be continued in the future.

Although the terms of the Nieman will directed that journalism be interpreted in a broad sense, Nieman Fellowships have gone almost exclusively to reporters and editors of the print press. Within this category, certain newspapers and magazines have had a constant relationship with the Nieman program. For example, Pinkerton says, "the South, decade after decade, kicks up more interesting newspapermen than any part of the country," and they are amply represented in the ranks of Nieman alumni.

In addition to a dearth of radio and television journalists, the Nieman program has brought only eight women to Harvard. In order to correct some of these imbalances, Thomson sent out a mass mailing to newspapers last fall. Almost twice the usual number of applications came back, and of this group, 40 will be interviewed by the Nieman Selection Committee this weekend.

In the process of "utilizing Harvard," Niemans pursue a variety of academic and extracurricular activities. For example, current Nieman Bob Stanton, an AP science writer from the West Coast, spent much of the year as a bench regular in the Biology labs to observe and experience a scientist's milieu first-hand. Niemans Wayne Greenhaw of The Alabama Journal and Ed Williams, capitol correspondent for The Greenville, Miss. Delta-Democrat Times, offered an Institute of Politics seminar on Southern Politics. Another Nieman-sponsored course this Spring was a Quincy House seminar on journalism led by Bob Wyrick, a former Newsday reporter.

In addition, more than half of this year's Nieman group enrolled in a fiction writing seminar taught by Diana Thomson. ("While we don't want to turn our journalists into novelists, many of them can't suppress the itch." Thomson remarked).

Whether it is through the Nieman program or outside it, the Fellows tend to plunge into all the things which they never had time to do while on the job. Bob Wyrick, for example, has done most of the cooking for his family and has studied classical guitar at the New England Conservatory of Music this year. Although he estimates that a good classical guitarist must practice four hours every day, he notes some improvement on an average of two hours' daily practice.

As the Nieman line-up indicates, participants bring radically varying backgrounds to the program and use Harvard in individualized ways. Most Niemans concur, however, on the basic professional benefits derived from the year-long experience. The year literally stops the presses of their professional lives and allows them to gain distance on a world which they confront daily at close-range.

This chance to remove themselves from the mainstream of day-to-day events and pressures is in fact the aspect of the program which is most favorably underscored by former Niemans.

"Most Niemans are basically unhappy about something in the profession or in the work they were doing," Bill Stockton, an AP science writer and current Nieman says. "But the people who have come here find the year has greatly changed them. Their experience can be translated into tangible things that the world of journalism can see. You have a year to be thoughtful and reflective in a highly charged intellectual atmosphere--and it puts it all together."

Kevin Buckley, Newsweek's Saigon correspondent for four years until he came to Harvard as a Nieman this year, says that the program can't fail to help people be better journalists. "It's a good thing to take a year off in any profession," Buckley said. "You particularly need to escape the deadening pace that most jobs in journalism require. For me it was extremely valuable to have the time to get reacquainted with the United States and to think it all through."

Although Carl Sims, former editor of The Bay State Banner, has not yet completed his Nieman year, he feels free to call it "the most valuable year of my professional life." Sims, who covered urban and ghetto affairs prior to coming to Harvard, said that the year gave him free rein to bounce some of the "gut feeling" he picked up as a reporter off of academic specialists in race relations, ghetto politics and urban sociology.

Sims said he applied for a Fellowship because he felt that as a black professional, he would be needed to explain what "black people are doing and why they got there." A year later, Sims says that he feels less strongly about that particular goal. "This year has helped to convince me that Americans blacks are two distinct things--they're Americans and they're blacks, in that order," Sims said. "Unlike all other groups, except for Mayflower Wasps and American Indians, they are in a unique position. Blacks don't have a heritage except an American one. They are a people who have to make it because there's no place for them to run to, nothing to hide behind. It's more a question of class than of skin color."

As a result of their years as Niemans, Sims feels that he and the other Fellows have "gotten out of the habit of salivating whenever we hear the fire bell ring. We're more interested in the whys, not the whats."

The time which seems to foster a broadening of perspectives for many Niemans works advantageously both for those who go into newspaper management as well as those who continue as reporters. Carol Liston, formerly a weekly columnist for The Boston Globe and now assistant to Globe Editor Tom Winship, says that her year as a Nieman ('71-'72), "dramatically changed the way I looked at journalism." As a columnist, Liston said she focused primarily on issues of governmental reform. She has not written a column since Harvard and says that she is now much more concerned with the direction of The Globe and its impact on the Boston community. The change came as a result of a seminar in American history she took here and of talking with fellow Niemans who had many insights into newspapers, she said.

Interaction among the Nieman fellows themselves also gives each of them a glimpse into areas of journalism with which they are unfamiliar and into the problems which are shared by the profession at large.

The 1945 Nieman class co-authored a book, Your Newspaper: Blueprint for a Better Press, which was published in 1947. In retrospect, Robert Manning, now editor of The Atlantic Monthly and a Nieman in 1945, says the book may have been somewhat pretentious but he notes that it was "a little bit ahead of its time" in asking such questions as who should control the press.

Stockton said that last Fall's informal Nieman sessions often turned into "group therapy sessions for unhappy journalists." The number of similar sessions has subsided, Stockton said, and although the groups reached no conclusions, he feels that their discussions made him consider questions such as ethics in reporting that he never gave thought to before.

"Take the coverage of Watergate for example," he said. "Is Senator Proxmire right that the press is on a McCarthyite witchhunt? A year ago I wouldn't have thought twice about it."

A standard joke is that a Nieman isn't good for anything more than membership in a Harvard club and a job at Time (Newsweek) magazine. The joke speaks both to the striking loyalty which most Niemans feel to the program and also to its reputation as a job improvement mechanism.

Thomson acknowledges that receiving a Nieman Fellowship is considered an award by members of the profession and that it puts a feather in the cap of young journalists.

But whether Niemans move on to bigger and better things because they have received an offer while at Harvard or because the year here has altered their perspectives vis-a-vis journalism, Thomson feels that the Nieman program creates an incentive for editors and publishers to improve the profession.

"The majority of Nieman Fellows have gone back for a significant time," he observed. "And some stay forever--usually because their employer makes things attractive for them. When they leave it's because the newspaper is dreary."

While no one at Harvard would admit that the program serves to hand-pick tomorrow's journalistic greats, and while certainly not all Niemans either enjoy the year or go on to establish a name for themselves, it is true that Harvard is looking for something special when it selects each year's Nieman group.

William M. Pinkerton, who has served on the selection committee for the past 18 years, explains: "You are trying to make a judgment about who this person is going to be ten years from now, what he will contribute to journalism and whether there is anything a year at Harvard will do towards that end."

A Nieman's contribution to journalism is not necessarily measurable in terms of titles and positions, Pinkerton says. In fact it is difficult to measure the cumulative impact of the Nieman program on the profession. Harvard responded to Agnes Wahl Nieman's directive to elevate the standards of journalism by offering a unique prescription and letting the journalists do the rest.