Grady Clay, NF ’49, a journalist and a leading national authority on urban design who wrote for The Courier-Journal and edited Landscape Architecture Quarterly, died Sunday, March 17, at 96. Architect and friend Steve Wiser called Clay “one of the nation’s leading urban design thinkers.” Read more
Longtime Washington Post reporter and Nieman Watchdog Project founder Murrey Marder died on March 11, 2013, at the age of 93. A tireless crusader for watchdog and accountability journalism, he retired as a diplomatic correspondent for the Post in 1985 after reporting there for nearly four decades. During his long and storied career, he covered topics ranging from the Alger Hiss trial the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and was perhaps best known for challenging Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist investigations in the 1950’s. In 1957, Marder opened the Post’s London bureau, the first of the Washington Post Foreign Service. Marder was a Nieman Fellow in the class of 1950 and used his life savings to fund the Nieman Watchdog Project at Harvard. Read more
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Stanley Karnow, a 1958 Nieman Fellow known for his exhaustive and insightful coverage of Southeast Asia, has died at the age of 87. A 1947 graduate of Harvard University, Karnow began his career as a Paris correspondent for Time magazine in the 1950s, reporting on events in Western Europe and North Africa. Read more
Shelby Scates, a 1963 Nieman Fellow and longtime political reporter and columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, died on Jan. 3 at the age of 81. He covered wars and presidential campaigns as well as the ins and outs of Washington state politics. An avid climber, he scaled Mount Rainier nine times, reached the summit of Mt. McKinley and in 1978, covered the first American party to climb K2. Scates was the author of three books and a memoir, “War and Politics by Other Means.” Read more
Larry L. King, NF ’70, died on December 20 at the age of 83. A native of Texas and a prolific journalist and author, King was perhaps best known as playwright of “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” based on an article he wrote for Playboy magazine. Read more
James R. Whelan, the founding editor and publisher of The Washington Times, the newspaper established in 1982 by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his South Korea-based Unification Church, died on Saturday at his home in Miami. Mr. Whelan was ousted from the newspaper after just two years, saying it had become what its detractors had always said it was, “a Moonie newspaper.” He was a 1967 Nieman Fellow. Read more
Sebastian Kleu, a former economics editor for the South African newspaper Die Burger who also served as chairman of the South African Board of Trade and Industry, has died. He was the second South African to be named as a Nieman Fellow and came to Harvard as a member of the class of 1962. Read more
Zwelakhe Sisulu, NF ’85, a South African opposition newspaper editor and anti-apartheid activist who was jailed several times in the 1970s and ’80s for speaking out against black oppression, died Oct. 4 at the age of 61. Read more
Robert Manning, an influential editor of The Atlantic Monthly and a 1946 Nieman Fellow, died of lymphoma at a hospital in Boston on Sept. 28, 2012. He was 92. Read more
For 30 of his 42 years at The Globe and Mail, three weekly columns were influential in determining a book's success. Although his byline disappeared with his retirement more than 20 years ago, former Globe and Mail literary editor William French is still remembered by former colleagues and literary admirers as a giant of his day — Canada's dominant literary critic during a formative period of the national literature. Read more
