Niemans

Four Harvard professors and three journalists will serve on the committee to select about 21 Nieman Fellows in Journalism for the academic year 1976-1977.

Each grant provides for nine months of residence and study at Harvard for journalists on leave from their current jobs.

Patricia A. Graham, dean of the Radcliffe Institute, Robert J. Kiely, Professor of English and Master of Adams House, Richard E. Neustadt, Professor of Government, and James C. Thomson Jr., lecturer on General Education and Curator of the Nieman Fellowships will assist journalists from the WashingtonPost, the Chicago Tribune and The Louisville Courier-Journal in choosing the 39th annual group of fellows.

Professional journalists who have won fellowships in the past have been in their early to mid-thirties and have come to study "everything they need to know that they don't know to be productive journalists," Thomson said yesterday.

The seven-member committee will spend the next two or three months interviewing an estimated 120 applicants from the U.S. and other countries.

The question "how did America get this way," Thomson said, is usually the topic of study for the Nieman fellows on sabbatical from their newspapers, with a focus on economics, politics, or history. Some journalists who have worked abroad, however, concentrate in fields such as Chinese or Soviet studies.