Bill Kovach

Bill Kovach (Albanian: Bill Kovaçi) is a US journalist, former Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, former editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and co-author of the book, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and The Public Should Expect.

Born in 1932 in East Tennessee of Albanian parents, Kovach planned after attending college at East Tennessee State University to go to graduate school in marine biology. After four years in the U.S. Navy, a summer job at the Johnson City Press Chronicle in Johnson City, Tennessee persuaded him to go into journalism.

Kovach covered the civil rights movement, politics and Appalachian poverty for the Nashville Tennessean from 1960 to 1967. In 1965, he was involved in a fight for public access to the legislature, when he refused to leave a committee hearing following a call for executive session. The state senate passed a resolution revoking his floor privileges. The Tennessean and editor John Seigenthaler, Sr. led a successful fight to open the legislative chambers.

After Kovach spent a year at Stanford University on a journalism fellowship, Scotty Reston of The New York Times Washington bureau hired Kovach in 1968, and Kovach spent 18 years there, including serving as its Washington bureau chief.

After a tempestuous two-year tenure as editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, when his staff won two Pulitzer Prizes and were finalists for several others, Kovach moved on to Harvard University in 1989 as a fellow, then curator, of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

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