 Bill Kovach
Bill Kovach was born in 1932 in Greeneville, Tennessee, but grew up thirty miles away in Johnson City. The day after he graduated from high school, he joined the Navy and served from 1951 to 1955. He then attended East Tennessee State University on the G.I. Bill and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology in 1959.
Mr. Kovach began his career in journalism in 1959 at the Johnson City Press-Chronicle. From 1960 to 1967, he was a reporter for The Nashville Tennessean and covered the civil rights movement, Southern politics, and Appalachian poverty. After a year of study on a journalism fellowship at Stanford University, he joined The New York Times in 1968, where he worked for eighteen years, serving from 1979 to 1986 as Chief of The New York Times Washington Bureau. Mr. Kovach was the Editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for two years; then he was appointed a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in the class of 1988–1989 and remained as Curator of the Nieman Foundation.
He retired from Harvard in 2001 and returned to Washington, where he is now Senior Counselor to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Mr. Kovach co-authored The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect and Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media; he has contributed to several books, including Profiles in Courage for Our Time, and numerous magazines and newspapers throughout the world. As an editor, Mr. Kovach supervised newspaper reporting projects that won four Pulitzer Prizes. His other distinctions include the Professional Freedom and Responsibility Award of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and the Harvard Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists, and founding Chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists; he has served on Pulitzer Prize juries and the National Magazine Awards jury.
Mr. Kovach and his wife, Lynne, have four children and seven grandchildren.
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