TRAVERSE CITY, Minn. — Bob Giles, 90, an award-winning newspaperman who, in the course of his career, covered some of the most important news of the day and earned the highest honors of the industry, died today.

Giles was in a hospice facility in Traverse City after battling metastatic melanoma, his family said.

“Our dear dad died this morning at 7:50,” his children, Dave, Rob and Megan Giles Cooney, wrote in an email message, mentioning their plan to have a memorial celebration in northern Michigan with a date to be decided later.

During his retirement here, Giles was an active member of the Traverse City Record-Eagle Editorial Board. He also volunteered for civic and cultural groups, including the National Writers Series and the International Affairs Forum.

Following a stellar 40-year newspaper career, including serving as editor and publisher of The Detroit News and, prior to that, as executive editor and then editor of the Democrat & Chronicle and the Times-Union in Rochester, N.Y., Giles became the curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University in 2000.

Prior to that, he was a senior vice president of The Freedom Forum, where he served as editor-in-chief of The Freedom Forum’s Media Studies Journal.

His career began in 1958 at the Akron Beacon Journal. As managing editor there in 1970, he directed coverage of the campus shootings at Kent State, for which the newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize.

Also under his editorship, The Detroit News won a Pulitzer in 1994 for the paper’s disclosures of a scandal in the Michigan House Fiscal Agency.

Giles also won the Scripps-Howard Foundation’s Distinguished Journalism Citation in 1978 for “outstanding public service in the cause of the First Amendment.”

He is the author of “Newsroom Management: A Guide to Theory and Practice.”

A graduate of DePauw University and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Giles was a Nieman Fellow in 1966. He received an honorary doctorate in journalism from DePauw in 1996.

Outside the newsroom, he led numerous newspaper organizations, including the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Associated Press Managing Editors.

Survivors include two sons, David and Rob; a daughter, Megan Giles Cooney; and grandchildren.

His wife of 61 years, psychologist Nancy Giles, died in 2021.

In lieu of flowers and to support journalism education, the family suggests that donations be made to KU Endowment in support of the Giles Family Scholarship Fund. Send donations to KU Endowment, P.O. Box 928, Lawrence, KS 66044 or give online at www.kuendowment.org/givenow [kuendowment.org].

Please see Wednesday’s Record-Eagle for more about Giles, his life and contributions to the field of journalism and the community at large.