NEWS

Photo note: To download a photo of Robert Giles, see below.

Importance of training for journalists to be subject of Nov. 11 talk at UNC

By KATIE BLIXT
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- Robert Giles, curator of Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, will speak about the importance of training for journalists Nov. 11 at 7:15 p.m. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The free public talk in 111 Carroll Hall will be part of the Reed Sarratt Lecture Series in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Giles is the seventh curator of the foundation, which offers the world's oldest mid-career professional fellowships for journalists. In his view, many newspapers do not invest sufficiently in training for their journalists.

Before he joined the foundation, Giles was senior vice president of The Freedom Forum, a non-partisan, international foundation dedicated to freedom of speech and of the press. He was instrumental in a major Freedom Forum initiative to increase the ranks of minorities working in newsrooms.

Giles also was a newspaper editor for more than 25 years, during which two newspapers won Pulitzer Prizes under his leadership: the Beacon Journal in 1971, when he was managing editor, for coverage of the shootings at Kent State University; and the Detroit News in 1994, when Giles was editor, for the newspaper’s disclosures of a scandal in the Michigan House Fiscal Agency.

Giles, a graduate of DePauw University, holds a master’s degree in 1956 from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He was a Nieman Fellow in 1966 and has been a Gannett professional-in-residence at the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas.

The Sarratt series, begun in 1987, honors the late Reed Sarratt, a Charlotte native and 1937 Carolina graduate. Sarratt directed the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association Foundation for many years and later directed the association itself.

Sarratt, the inaugural president of the school’s Journalism Alumni and Friends Association, was named to the N.C. Journalism Hall of Fame in 1985. Former Sarratt lecturers include TV journalist David Brinkley, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Jeff MacNelly and founding editor of Ms. Magazine Patricia Carbine.

For more information contact John Sweeney at 919-962-4074 or at jsweeney@email.unc.edu.

- 30 -

(Blixt is a junior journalism and mass communication major from Bermuda Run.)

Photo URL: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/visiting/giles_bob102402.jpg

Contact: John Sweeney, 919-962-4074, jsweeney@email.unc.edu