Robert Giles

Robert H. Giles is Curator of the Nieman Foundation. He worked for nearly 40 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, most recently as editor and publisher of The Detroit News, which he joined in 1986 as executive editor. From 1977-1986, Giles was executive editor and then editor at the Democrat & Chronicle and the Times-Union, in Rochester, N.Y. His newspaper career began in 1958 at the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, where he held several reporting and editing positions before becoming managing editor and then executive editor.

As managing editor of the Beacon Journal, Giles directed coverage of the campus shootings at Kent State University, for which the newspaper was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Before coming to Harvard in 2000, he was a senior vice president of the Freedom Forum and executive director of its Media Studies Center in New York City.

Giles is a graduate of DePauw University and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He was a Nieman Fellow in 1966. He received an honorary Doctorate in Journalism from DePauw in 1996.