Nieman Fellows share belief in stories that change people's lives

By Shawn Zeller '97

Special to the Gazette

Even now, years later, she cannot tell the story without crying. New York Times reporter Felicia Lee was writing about poor children in America. "The young woman I profiled had a mother who was dying of AIDS who died while I was writing the story," Lee recalled, with tears in her eyes. "Her father had died a few years earlier from alcoholism. Five of her friends had been killed in the project she lived in. She had sold drugs and her mother had been a crack addict."

On the day the story ran, Lee received 100 phone calls from all over the country. One reader was so moved that he paid for the young woman's entire four years of college.

"Now, she is about to graduate from college," Lee said.

That sort of impact is what makes journalism worthwhile for Lee. "When you get that sort of response, it may sound clichéd, but it does make you feel good."

But Lee's type of journalism -- which involves spending a considerable amount of time with subjects, and getting to know them as people -- is all too rare in America these days, according to the veteran reporter. That's why Lee is here at Harvard this academic year as a Nieman Fellow. In taking courses on religion, black culture, and 20th-century American history, Lee hopes to improve herself as a journalist, and to direct her new knowledge toward journalism that really affects people's lives.

The Nieman Fellowship: A Brief History

This sort of journalism, journalism that changes people's lives, may have been what Agnes Wahl Nieman had in mind when she, in 1937, offered the University a generous monetary gift with the requirement that Harvard use the money "to promote and elevate the standards of journalism."

President James Bryant Conant appointed a committee of three dignitaries known for their scholarship and writing -- Archibald MacLeish, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Walter Lippmann -- to arrange a program utilizing the Nieman funding. But when the committee proposed what is now the Nieman Foundation -- an organization that would oversee 12 fellowships for journalists each year -- Conant was skeptical. He didn't believe that the owners of media outlets would allow their best reporters and editors to just pick up and leave for a year in the midst of the Depression.

Despite Conant's fears, the program began in 1939 and is now the oldest journalism fellowship in the world. This year, the 1,000th Nieman Fellow came to Harvard.

Each Nieman Fellow receives a grant which covers housing, tuition, and expenses. The spouses of Fellows are also given access to all parts of the University free of charge and daycare is provided for the children of Fellows.

As outlined by the Nieman committee, the Fellows can audit any course in any of the University's Schools. In addition, they gather three times each week to talk shop, and attend seminars given by one of the Fellows or by an outside figure in the journalism world.

Because the program was expanded in the 1950s to include international journalists, there are now approximately 20 Fellows each year chosen from a yearly pool of close to 300 applicants. Only journalists who have established themselves in their field are considered. Since the program began, Nieman Fellows have garnered 52 Pulitzer Prizes. Needless to say, if you aren't part of the journalism elite, don't bother applying.

The high standards make it all the more important that the program encourages journalism that moves the reader and does so in a responsible way. For Nieman Curator Bill Kovach, responsible impact journalism is not only a goal, but "a religion."

The Curator

People who knew Bill Kovach in the late 1950s probably never would have imagined that he would head the Nieman program one day. Kovach studied marine biology at the University of Miami. He never wrote a story for the college newspaper and he never had an internship. After his graduation, Kovach was ready to accept a fellowship at Duke University to continue his studies in marine biology. Then something happened. In retrospect, it must have been fate, but from the perspective of the time, it probably seemed just plain crazy. Kovach turned down the fellowship and started work at his local hometown paper in Johnson City, Tenn., in 1959. The rest, you might say, is history.

Kovach soon left the Johnson City paper and went to The Nashville Tennessean, where he established himself as a top-notch journalist covering Appalachian poverty and civil rights. Then he was off to The New York Times, finishing up there in 1986 as Washington bureau chief.

In 1986, Kovach was offered the job of executive editor at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. With the stated goal of "creating the world's next great newspaper in the South," Kovach agreed to take the job. In his first year, the paper received five Pulitzer Prize nominations, the most any paper has ever received in one year.

But when new management at The Constitution moved the paper toward a tabloid format in 1989, Kovach felt that everything he believed in was under attack. He quit.

Soon thereafter, Kovach received a call from his friend, Howard Simons, the Nieman Foundation curator who had been with The Washington Post while Kovach was working in Washington for The Times. Simons, known to the journalism community for his role in coverage of the Watergate scandal, had arranged with Harvard President Derek Bok for an emergency Nieman Fellowship for Kovach.

"It was a life ring for me," Kovach remembers. "I didn't get a golden handshake leaving Atlanta."

The fellowship gave Kovach time to breathe and consider his options. But then fate intervened in his life again, in the way of a tragedy.

"Howie called me into his office and told me he had some good news and some bad news," Kovach remembers. "I asked him about the bad news, and he told me that he had cancer and only had 60 days to live. After that, I couldn't imagine what the good news could be. But I asked, and he said, 'This means I don't have to floss my teeth anymore.' "

Simons' spitting-in-the-eye-of-death attitude carried over into a request he made of Kovach: to keep his condition a secret and to take over the program on a temporary basis, so as not to cloud the celebrations surrounding the program's 50th anniversary year. Kovach agreed.

"I was considering going back to The New York Times and I had offers from The Los Angeles Times and NBC," Kovach recalled. "But as I helped Howie work in those final months I realized how important a program this is to the state of journalism in the world."

Since then, Kovach has continuously sought to maintain the program's vision of what journalism ought to be in a world where journalistic standards are facing tremendous pressures.

"Journalism today is in a state of confusion," Kovach says. "The explosion of communication technology, and world economic and political reorganization, has put pressure on journalism to lower standards."

For Kovach, then, the Nieman Fellowship, whose only request of its Fellows is that they improve themselves as journalists and as students, is one way to counteract the forces of the market.

"With the fellowship we are investing in the future," Kovach said. "We want their work to exemplify where journalistic standards should be. The fellowship is a gift so that the Fellows can prepare themselves to do service."

Very Worried about Her Country

As a result of her relentless attempts to provide the Colombian people with the truth about the drug trade and government corruption, Nieman Fellow Maria Cristina Caballero, of the Colombian news magazine Cambio 16, has been followed and threatened. More worrisome for her is that the lives of her family have also been threatened. But for Caballero, bringing the truth to the Colombian people is a calling that makes the risks worthwhile.

While at Cambio 16, Caballero has interviewed William Rodriguez, who, according to some law enforcement authorities, is the leader of the most powerful drug cartel in the world, the Cali Cartel, though he himself claims he is not. She has also uncovered evidence that led to the exposure of government involvement with the Cali Cartel, the largest corruption scandal in Colombia's history.

"I am very worried about Colombia's social and political problems," Caballero said. "People in the United States have trouble understanding why it is hard to stop our people from growing coca. Some of them have no alternatives. They live in regions where there are no roads and they are in the middle of drug trafficking, guerrilla, and paramilitary forces. They have no skills and no education. Some of them would starve.

"It's another world here. You can see that life has other dimensions and possibilities. People have more opportunities. It's so different to live here, to know that you can walk around without so much fear. Now the people of Colombia are fearing another wave of narco-terrorism because the Colombian Congress is studying how to approve again the extradition treaty [that would help send drug traffickers to the United States for trial]. The Colombian people deserve a better situation."

While at Harvard, Caballero is taking courses about leadership, ethics, conducting investigations, criminal law, and negotiation at the Law School and the Kennedy School of Government. She hopes that these courses will help her become a better negotiator and investigator when she returns to Colombia.

"Sometimes I feel like I am in a film, but journalism is my life," Caballero said. "I have been trying to do a service for my country. It's a vocation."

Questions about the Future

Robert Vare has been the articles editor at The New Yorker, a position that, by definition, means he asks lots of questions and tries to help an individual piece of writing find its own form. Now that he is a Nieman Fellow, he can consider the whole field of journalism as he would any particular article.

"I have lots of questions about the future of the general-interest magazine, and this is a good opportunity to raise some of those issues with others in the field," Vare said. "The long nonfiction narrative pieces that I love are no longer possible in most magazines. I fear that there is a 'newsweekly-ization' of magazines. The pieces are getting shorter and always have to be topical. It overwhelms quality when you need to cut and jam in more pieces rather than letting stories seek their own length."

At Harvard, Vare said he is taking classes with a number of well-known professors, including Michael Sandel, Alan Dershowitz, Robert Coles, Ellen Fitzpatrick, and E.O. Wilson -- professors from a wide variety of fields, but all of whom are known as outstanding communicators.

A Place for Idealism

Like Vare, all the Nieman Fellows seem enthusiastic about talking over their concerns with each other and with the Harvard faculty. The fellowship almost operates as a haven for these workaholics, allowing them to step back and think about their profession without the pressures of the daily grind. Not that they're on vacation -- they are still working hard, keeping up with the weekly reading for their 20th-century history courses, meeting for shop talks with the other Nieman Fellows, and listening to presentations from some of journalism's foremost names. The fellowship is demanding, but demanding in a different way. And always in their minds is the importance of maintaining journalism's standards while at the same time keeping journalism relevant to people's lives.

Felicia Lee may have put it best.

The Nieman Fellowship "is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Lee said. "I'm meeting smart people, trading ideas, getting new perspectives. It's simply been great."