A committee of two journalists and two members of the Harvard University community will select approximately 12 American journalists for the University's 1997-98 Nieman Fellowships, Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation, announced recently.

The Fellowships are awarded to working journalists of particular accomplishment and promise for an academic year of study at Harvard. In May an announcement will be made of the journalists appointed to the 1997-98 class of Nieman Fellows.

The committee is chaired by Bill Kovach, former editor of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, former Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, and Nieman Fellow '89. The committee members are:

Elizabeth Bartholet, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School.

Ann Marie Lipinski, Managing Editor, Chicago Tribune; Nieman Fellow '90.

Sydney H. Schanberg, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist; former columnist, The New York Times and New York Newsday.

Timothy C. Weiskel, director, Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values; visiting lecturer on religion and society, Center for the Study of Values in Public Life, Harvard Divinity School.

The Nieman Fellowships were established in 1938 through a bequest from Agnes Wahl Nieman in memory of her husband, Lucius, founder and publisher of The Milwaukee Journal. The fellowships, now in their 59th year, are the oldest midcareer fellowships for journalists in the world. Over 1,000 journalists, representing various media throughout the United States and in more than 60 other countries, have studied at Harvard as Nieman Fellows.