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.