Bob Giles, newspaper editor in Rochester and Detroit, dies at 90

Bob Giles, the former editor of the Democrat and Chronicle and Times-Union who was part of Pulitzer Prize-winning teams before and after his time in Rochester, died Aug. 7 at the age of 90.

The cause of death was metastatic melanoma, his daughter, Megan Cooney said. He died in hospice in Traverse City, Michigan, where he lived.

Giles was executive editor of the two Rochester Gannett newspapers from 1977 to 1986. He came from Akron, where as managing editor of the Akron Beacon Journal he directed coverage of the Kent State University massacre in May 1970, when members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on campus Vietnam War protesters, killing four students and wounding nine others.

The Beacon Journal won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage.

In 2020, Giles wrote a book titled "When Truth Mattered: The Kent State Shootings 50 Years Later,” which chronicled the fatal shootings and how the Beacon Journal covered an event that led to a nationwide student strike that closed hundreds of colleges and universities.

After Rochester he spent 11 years at the Detroit News, where in 1994 the paper received a Pulitzer for its reporter on embezzlement and nepotism in state government, leading to 10 criminal convictions in state and federal court.

“Bob was a real champion of great journalism,” said Jim Mitzelfeld, one of the reporters on those stories, who worked under him as an intern in Rochester, New York, before Giles hired him at the Detroit News in 1988. “Although soft-spoken, Bob worked quietly behind the scenes to assemble an amazing team of top editors and reporters, and then let us loose with his full support to go after the big stories that needed to be told. He took our rivalry with the competing Free Press as serious as anyone, and always got a huge grin when we took the Freep to the cleaners.”

How his career evolved

Giles, an Ohio native, attended DePauw University, where he played on the baseball team and became editor and chief of the newspaper, according to the school.

He later earned a master’s degree at Columbia University and served in the Army before joining the Akron Beacon Journal in 1958.

He arrived in Rochester in 1977 and was named executive editor of the two daily newspapers that same year. At that time Rochester was still the center of the Gannett enterprise; Giles was editor when USA TODAY was first launched in 1982.

Former Democrat and Chronicle reporter Steve Orr remembered him being a man of few words, but very intelligent.

"It was a difficult balancing act to be editor of two newspapers on the same floor that competed with each other," Orr said. "He was the one in the middle, and I think he negotiated that pretty well."

He was the last editor in Rochester to live in the Gannett-owned mansion on East Avenue, where his Christmas parties were "the high point of the social season for every reporter," Orr said. He was also the first person in the Gannett building to have a personal computer.

Giles joined The Detroit News as executive editor in May 1986, arriving two weeks after a controversial Joint Operating Agreement was announced between the News and its rival, the Detroit Free Press following Gannett Co.'s purchase of The News. The agreement was approved in late 1989.

Embracing diversity and strained labor relations

At the Detroit News, Giles created a more racially diverse newsroom in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the newspaper hired more Black reporters and editors.

"For me personally, he gave me opportunities to advance along the management track at the Detroit News," said Luther Keith, a former assistant managing editor who now directs the nonprofit Arise! Detroit. "I never planned to get into management at all. But he really solved some of that tension with me.”

He also was responsible for Deb Price becoming the first newspaper columnist in America to write about gay rights.

"I said, 'Why don’t you show us some sample columns?' She gave us a stack that were really well done and they seemed to fit into the idea that it was a changing world, and Deb had a capacity for expressing that,” he told the Detroit News after Price died in 2020.

As Giles wrote in an explanation introducing readers, the column was considered “the first of its kind in daily metropolitan newspapers. While newspapers across America, including our own, have increased news coverage of gay issues, no voice is regularly heard that looks at life from a gay perspective. … I think you will find her column provocative and enlightening.”

Some readers immediately agreed.

As recounted in the book Price wrote with her partner, “Say Hi to Joyce: America's First Gay Column Comes Out,” the publication resulted in enormous attention and some subscriber cancellations.

"I clearly remember that he was unwavering in his support. Even though the paper initially lost subscriptions because of Deb’s column, he just doubled down on supporting it," said Price's wife, Joyce Murdoch. "The vitriol with which some people reacted made Bob feel all the more certain it was important to have a calm, reasonable, often funny openly gay voice out there in the world for his readers to read. He took that step when other publishers around the country weren’t ready to."

Former Detroit News editor Judy Diebolt recalled him as a gracious manager adept at recognizing staffers' professional and personal needs.

"I saw numerous instances of his compassion and generosity when someone on the staff was seriously ill or caring for a dying relative," she said. "More than once I heard him say: “Don’t worry about the paper, this is the most important thing in your life right now. Do what you need to do. For me, he was a great boss and a great friend."

Giles was publisher and editor when six labor unions struck the Detroit News and Free Press in July 1995 as the newspapers pushed to get more than modest profits after the joint operating agreement took five years to get them in the black.

As he pushed for merit pay, where raises would be awarded based on merit instead of given out automatically as part of a contract, Giles become the public face of Detroit News management in a labor-friendly town.

"We're going to hire a whole new work force and go on without unions or they can surrender unconditionally and salvage what they can," he told a reporter during the strike.

Union leaders in Detroit called Giles "a corporate man first, a journalist second," while the Columbia Journalism Review criticized him for "strikingly tilted" coverage of the strike in the newspaper itself, including headlines such as "Strikers Losing Readers' Respect."

In 1997, three months after the unions agreed to end a 19-month strike against the newspapers, he left to become executive director of the Freedom Forum's Media Studies Center in New York.

"Everything Bob did grew out of his belief in the value of good, honest journalism, both to the individual reader and to society as a whole," said James Tobin, a former Detroit News reporter, author of "Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II" and a professor of journalism at Miami University.

Post-newspaper career

In 2000, Giles became curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, where he served until 2011. He expanded programs and launched the Nieman Storyboard to help narrative journalists and the Nieman Journalism Lab, which led experiments in new forms of journalism in the internet age.

"Bob leaves behind a community of devoted Nieman Fellows who treasured him for his grace and generosity," said Nieman Foundation Curator Ann Marie Lipinski. "He cared deeply about the fellows and their families and together with Nancy placed a high value on building support for each year’s fellowship cohort. He well understood the pressures the journalists had been laboring under, and worked hard to create a program that offered inspiration and a path forward."

In 2012, he received a Yankee Quill Award from the Academy of New England Journalists and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Outside the newsroom, Mr. Giles led numerous newspaper organizations, including the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Associated Press Managing Editors. He also was president of the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications and authored a textbook, “Newsroom Management: A Guide to Theory and Practice.”

Besides his daughter, other survivors include two children, David and Rob, and grandchildren. His wife of 61 years, psychologist Nancy Giles, died in 2021.

Correction: An earlier version of this story had the wrong year for when Giles became executive editor of the Democrat and Chronicle and the Times-Union. That has been corrected above.

mhicks@detroitnews.com

Staff Writer Kara Berg contributed.

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Detroit News Editor Bob Giles, Pulitzer Prize winner, dies