Business
Robert H. Giles, Newspaper Editor and Nieman Curator, Dies at 90
Robert H. Giles, who oversaw Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage at two newspapers — including reports on the fatal shooting of four antiwar protesters by National Guard troops on the Kent State University campus in Ohio in 1970 — and later served as curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University for more than a decade, died on Aug. 7 in Traverse City, in northern Michigan. He was 90.
The cause of his death, in a hospice facility, was complications of metastatic melanoma, said Ellen Tuttle, a spokeswoman for the Nieman Foundation.
A lifelong journalist and author and a former Nieman fellow himself, Mr. Giles (pronounced with a soft “G”) presided over the Nieman Foundation from 2000 to 2011.
He enhanced the prestigious foundation’s primary mission: educating midcareer journalists. He also presided over the online expansion of its quarterly magazine, Nieman Reports, as well as the Nieman Watchdog Project, which examines and supports public-interest journalism; the Nieman Journalism Lab, which helps prepare journalists for the digital future of the profession; and the Nieman Storyboard website, which promotes long-form narrative storytelling.
He also introduced several awards; raised funds to expand the foundation’s campus headquarters; offered a haven to international journalists who were persecuted because of their profession; wrote about issues confronting his colleagues; and created fellowships to address subjects he felt were not being sufficiently covered, including global health and local government.
“Bob leaves behind a community of devoted Nieman fellows who treasured him for his grace and generosity,” Ann Marie Lipinski, the current Nieman curator, said in a statement. “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.”
Robert Hartmann Giles was born on June 6, 1933, in Cleveland to Robert Hamilton Giles and Grace (Hartmann) Giles.
He graduated from DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and went on to earn a master’s from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. After serving in the Army, he was hired by The Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio.
He studied as a Nieman fellow in 1965 and 1966 and then returned to Akron, where he was managing editor of The Beacon Journal during an anti-Vietnam War rally on May 4, 1970, that resulted in the killing of four unarmed students and the wounding of nine others by Ohio National Guard troops on the Kent State campus.
His newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting for its coverage. In 2020, he published “When Truth Mattered: The Kent State Shootings 50 Years Later,” in which he recounted how his staff covered the story.
In 1975, after 17 years as an editorial writer, city editor, managing editor and executive editor, he left The Beacon Journal to teach at the University of Kansas School of Journalism.
From 1977 to 1986, he was executive editor and then editor of The Democrat and Chronicle and The Times-Union in Rochester, N.Y.
He was named executive editor of The Detroit News in 1986 and later served as editor and publisher. During his 11-year tenure there, he experienced a 19-month strike and the implementation of a joint operating agreement with the rival Detroit Free Press. He also oversaw The News’s exposé of embezzlement at the Michigan House Fiscal Agency, an arm of the state House of Representatives, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994.
In 1997, he retired from The News to join the Freedom Forum, a nonprofit First Amendment advocacy organization, as a senior vice president and executive director of its Media Studies Center in New York City.
Mr. Giles was the author of “Newsroom Management: A Guide to Theory and Practice” (1987) and a past president of the American Society of News Editors and the Associated Press Managing Editors Association.
He is survived by his children, David and Rob Giles and Megan Cooney; four grandchildren; two step-grandsons; and his sister, Lois Eynon. His wife, Nancy (Morgan) Giles, died in 2021.
“I think one of my strengths as a leader, editor, curator, has been my ability to enable people to succeed, to give them a lot of freedom to do their jobs, to come up with ideas, to fail, to take risks, to support them but not to meddle, because they know more about what they’re doing than I do,” Mr. Giles told Nieman News in 2011 when he retired at 77.
“To be in a position to give this opportunity to a group of people every year,” he added, “is quite extraordinary.”
Business
Cookies, Cocktails and Mushrooms on the Menu as Justices Hear Bank Fraud Case
In a lively Supreme Court argument on Tuesday that included references to cookies, cocktails and toxic mushrooms, the justices tried to find the line between misleading statements and outright lies in the case of a Chicago politician convicted of making false statements to bank regulators.
The case concerned Patrick Daley Thompson, a former Chicago alderman who is the grandson of one former mayor, Richard J. Daley, and the nephew of another, Richard M. Daley. He conceded that he had misled the regulators but said his statements fell short of the outright falsehoods he said were required to make them criminal.
The justices peppered the lawyers with colorful questions that tried to tease out the difference between false and misleading statements.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asked whether a motorist pulled over on suspicion of driving while impaired said something false by stating that he had had one cocktail while omitting that he had also drunk four glasses of wine.
Caroline A. Flynn, a lawyer for the federal government, said that a jury could find the statement to be false because “the officer was asking for a complete account of how much the person had had to drink.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked about a child who admitted to eating three cookies when she had consumed 10.
Ms. Flynn said context mattered.
“If the mom had said, ‘Did you eat all the cookies,’ or ‘how many cookies did you eat,’ and the child says, ‘I ate three cookies’ when she ate 10, that’s a false statement,” Ms. Flynn said. “But, if the mom says, ‘Did you eat any cookies,’ and the child says three, that’s not an understatement in response to a specific numerical inquiry.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked whether it was false to label toxic mushrooms as “a hundred percent natural.” Ms. Flynn did not give a direct response.
The case before the court, Thompson v. United States, No. 23-1095, started when Mr. Thompson took out three loans from Washington Federal Bank for Savings between 2011 and 2014. He used the first, for $110,000, to finance a law firm. He used the next loan, for $20,000, to pay a tax bill. He used the third, for $89,000, to repay a debt to another bank.
He made a single payment on the loans, for $390 in 2012. The bank, which did not press him for further payments, went under in 2017.
When the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and a loan servicer it had hired sought repayment of the loans plus interest, amounting to about $270,000, Mr. Thompson told them he had borrowed $110,000, which was true in a narrow sense but incomplete.
After negotiations, Mr. Thompson in 2018 paid back the principal but not the interest. More than two years later, federal prosecutors charged him with violating a law making it a crime to give “any false statement or report” to influence the F.D.I.C.
He was convicted and ordered to repay the interest, amounting to about $50,000. He served four months in prison.
Chris C. Gair, a lawyer for Mr. Thompson, said his client’s statements were accurate in context, an assertion that met with skepticism. Justice Elena Kagan noted that the jury had found the statements were false and that a ruling in Mr. Thompson’s favor would require a court to rule that no reasonable juror could have come to that conclusion.
Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh said that issue was not before the court, which had agreed to decide the legal question of whether the federal law, as a general matter, covered misleading statements. Lower courts, they said, could decide whether Mr. Thompson had been properly convicted.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. asked for an example of a misleading statement that was not false. Mr. Gair, who was presenting his first Supreme Court argument, responded by talking about himself.
“If I go back and change my website and say ‘40 years of litigation experience’ and then in bold caps say ‘Supreme Court advocate,’” he said, “that would be, after today, a true statement. It would be misleading to anybody who was thinking about whether to hire me.”
Justice Alito said such a statement was, at most, mildly misleading. But Justice Kagan was impressed.
“Well, it is, though, the humblest answer I’ve ever heard from the Supreme Court podium,” she said, to laughter. “So good show on that one.”
Business
SEC probes B. Riley loan to founder, deals with franchise group
B. Riley Financial Inc. received more demands for information from federal regulators about its dealings with now-bankrupt Franchise Group as well as a personal loan for Chairman and co-founder Bryant Riley.
The Los Angeles-based investment firm and Riley each received additional subpoenas in November from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission seeking documents and information about Franchise Group, or FRG, the retail company that was once one of its biggest investments before its collapse last year, according to a long-delayed quarterly filing. The agency also wants to know more about Riley’s pledge of B. Riley shares as collateral for a personal loan, the filing shows.
B. Riley previously received SEC subpoenas in July for information about its dealings with ex-FRG chief executive Brian Kahn, part of a long-running probe that has rocked B. Riley and helped push its shares to their lowest in more than a decade. Bryant Riley, who founded the company in 1997 and built it into one of the biggest U.S. investment firms beyond Wall Street, has been forced to sell assets and raise cash to ease creditors’ concerns.
The firm and Riley “are responding to the subpoenas and are fully cooperating with the SEC,” according to the filing. The company said the subpoenas don’t mean the SEC has determined any violations of law have occurred.
Shares in B. Riley jumped more than 25% in New York trading after the company’s overdue quarterly filing gave investors their first formal look at the firm’s performance in more than half a year. The data included a net loss of more than $435 million for the three months ended June 30. The shares through Monday had plunged more than 80% in the past 12 months, trading for less than $4 each.
B. Riley and Kahn — a longstanding client and friend of Riley’s — teamed up in 2023 to take FRG private in a $2.8-billion deal. The transaction soon came under pressure when Kahn was tagged as an unindicted co-conspirator by authorities in the collapse of an unrelated hedge fund called Prophecy Asset Management, which led to a fraud conviction for one of the fund’s executives.
Kahn has said he didn’t do anything wrong, that he wasn’t aware of any fraud at Prophecy and that he was among those who lost money in the collapse. But federal investigations into his role have spilled over into his dealings with B. Riley and its chairman, who have said internal probes found they “had no involvement with, or knowledge of, any alleged misconduct concerning Mr. Kahn or any of his affiliates.”
FRG filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November, a move that led to hundreds of millions of dollars of losses for B. Riley. The collapse made Riley “personally sick,” he said at the time.
One of the biggest financial problems to arise from the FRG deal was a loan that B. Riley made to Kahn for about $200 million, which was secured against FRG shares. With that company’s collapse into bankruptcy in November wiping out equity holders, the value of the remaining collateral for this debt has now dwindled to only about $2 million, the filing shows.
Griffin writes for Bloomberg.
Business
Starbucks Reverses Its Open-Door Policy for Bathroom Use and Lounging
Starbucks will require people visiting its coffee shops to buy something in order to stay or to use its bathrooms, the company announced in a letter sent to store managers on Monday.
The new policy, outlined in a Code of Conduct, will be enacted later this month and applies to the company’s cafes, patios and bathrooms.
“Implementing a Coffeehouse Code of Conduct is something most retailers already have and is a practical step that helps us prioritize our paying customers who want to sit and enjoy our cafes or need to use the restroom during their visit,” Jaci Anderson, a Starbucks spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement.
Ms. Anderson said that by outlining expectations for customers the company “can create a better environment for everyone.”
The Code of Conduct will be displayed in every store and prohibit behaviors including discrimination, harassment, smoking and panhandling.
People who violate the rules will be asked to leave the store, and employees may call law enforcement, the policy says.
Before implementation of the new policy begins on Jan. 27, store managers will be given 40 hours to prepare stores and workers, according to the company. There will also be training sessions for staff.
This training time will be used to prepare for other new practices, too, including asking customers if they want their drink to stay or to go and offering unlimited free refills of hot or iced coffee to customers who order a drink to stay.
The changes are part of an attempt by the company to prioritize customers and make the stores more inviting, Sara Trilling, the president of Starbucks North America, said in a letter to store managers.
“We know from customers that access to comfortable seating and a clean, safe environment is critical to the Starbucks experience they love,” she wrote. “We’ve also heard from you, our partners, that there is a need to reset expectations for how our spaces should be used, and who uses them.”
The changes come as the company responds to declining sales, falling stock prices and grumbling from activist investors. In August, the company appointed a new chief executive, Brian Niccol.
Mr. Niccol outlined changes the company needed to make in a video in October. “We will simplify our overly complex menu, fix our pricing architecture and ensure that every customer feels Starbucks is worth it every single time they visit,” he said.
The new purchase requirement reverses a policy Starbucks instituted in 2018 that said people could use its cafes and bathrooms even if they had not bought something.
The earlier policy was introduced a month after two Black men were arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks while waiting to meet another man for a business meeting.
Officials said that the men had asked to use the bathroom, but that an employee had refused the request because they had not purchased anything. An employee then called the police, and part of the ensuing encounter was recorded on video and viewed by millions of people online, prompting boycotts and protests.
In 2022, Howard Schultz, the Starbucks chief executive at the time, said that the company was reconsidering the open-bathroom policy.
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