Bill Kovach, who has served as the curator of the Nieman Foundation since 1989, will resign his post effective next June, according to a letter he sent to the foundation's advisory board earlier this week.

The Nieman Foundation brings 24 professional journalists from around the nation and the world to Cambridge each year. Kovach came to Harvard as a Nieman Fellow in 1988-89 from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and stayed on as the foundation's curator.

Ten years later, Kovach, who is 67, said he feels it is time to move on, citing his desire to spend more time with his family. He also said the foundation would benefit from a curator who is more familiar with the rapidly expanding field of communications technology.

Kovach called the instant communication of information and images the single greatest change to affect the journalistic world in the last 10 years. According to Kovach, this technology has had and will continue to have "an extraordinary...and unknowable impact on the practice of journalism."

"Just as Gutenberg's press disoriented the world back then," Kovach said, this technology is "disorienting the world now."

He expressed his feeling that no matter how hard he tries to keep up with the times, his 10 years away from the newsroom have left him out of touch. The Nieman Foundation, he wrote in his letter to the advisory board, is ready for "an upgrade."

Kovach, who is also the ombudsperson for Brill's Content magazine, plans to spend more time with his family--his wife Lynne, his four children, and his six grandchildren--and to dedicate time to writing. He is in the process of co-authoring a book with Tom Rosenstiel that bears the working title, The Elements of Journalism.

Kovach also has a contract to write a memoir about his experience at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he was an editor for two years before resigning due to a dispute with the newspaper's owners.