The following are the remarks Dean Stephen B. Shepard made to the Class of 2010 at its December 15 graduation ceremonies.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the fourth commencement of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. We are here to celebrate the wonderful Class of 2010.

I want to start by recognizing some special guests. First, Leonard Tow and his daughter Emily Tow Jackson who gave us a challenge grant of $3 million to establish what is now the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. Thank you both for your vision and generosity.

I want also to thank David Westin, president of ABC News and a member of our advisory board since Day One. He has been a great friend and supporter of what we do. David is stepping down as president of ABC News, but happily will stay on our board.

Finally, I want to recognize Jack Rosenthal of Atlantic Philanthropies and formerly head of The New York Times Foundation. It was Jack who helped establish the $4 million Punch Sulzberger Scholarship Fund that has helped dozens of our students, including several members of this class.

Okay… the Class of 2010. You’re a very special group. You were willing to take a chance on a relatively new school that had graduated just two classes when you started here 16 months ago. You have played a major role in helping to establish us as one of the best graduate programs in the country. You have produced so much good journalism while you were here, demonstrating talent, grit, and passion. You made our newsroom your second home. You worked there, you bonded with classmates there, you made friends there. And you learned your craft there. It was thrilling to see.

When you arrived in August, 2009, we all knew that journalism was at a critical juncture. It was – and is – a time of profound and wrenching transition to the digital age. A lot of it is tough to watch – all those layoffs, cutbacks in coverage, shrinking revenues, slumping stock prices, and anxiety over new business models. If that wasn’t bad enough, we are still mired in an economic slump following the financial crisis. So your path will be difficult, especially in the beginning.

But I think all of us have come to realize something else, something far better: This is actually a fascinating time of opportunity, a chance for you and your generation to re-imagine journalism, to put your own stamp, your own ideas, on our venerable profession. Already, there is an astonishing array of experimentation and change going on in journalism today, some of it at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

In fact, journalism is expanding rapidly into a multimedia, interactive process with exciting opportunities for story-telling that simply didn’t exist a few years ago. Yes, you can still put words on paper, and I hope many of you do that. It’s a noble calling. But you can also tell stories with video, audio, web packages, blogs, podcasts, slide shows, or interactive journalism personalized for an audience of one. You can use social media to engage audiences. You can develop apps for tablet computers, Kindle-type readers, and mobile phones. You can embrace entrepreneurial opportunities to develop your own digital products or services for journalism. You are learning to think in new ways and be fluent across media platforms. In the process, you will transform journalism.

And there are many new outlets for your work, as well as job opportunities, at news outlets that simply didn’t exist when we opened this school four and a half years ago – sites like Politico, the Daily Beast, Huffington Post, AOL Patch, Talking Points Memo, TMZ, NBC’s Local Interactive Media, Global Post, Kaiser Health Network, Mainstreet Connect, and dozens of others. These new sites have hired hundreds of journalists, including several of our graduates. And traditional news media are hiring journalists who have these new skills. Have these gains offset the job loss in traditional media? No, not yet, but the transition is clearly underway.

In the midst of all this flux, how will you find your place in this New World Order of Journalism? How will you succeed?

For starters, it is important for you to know where your journalistic passion lies, what differentiates you from other talented young journalists. What kind of stories do you do especially well? Maybe you like to do on-the-street reporting. Or do you prefer to make sense of things in longer analytic pieces? Do you want to dig deep as an investigative reporter, going where no one else has gone before you? Do you want to create web sites or blogs, using photos, audio, and video? Can you report and write in a language other than English? Would you like to be an entrepreneur launching your own digital business?

There’s even an economic theory to describe what I’m talking about: It’s called the theory of comparative advantage and it was formulated in 1817 by a political economist named David Ricardo. It applied originally to trade between countries, but it applies to journalism as well. Find your comparative advantage in journalism – what you’re especially good at – and go for it.

I have one other suggestion to offer, which reflects a failing of my generation of journalists. Most of us didn’t get involved in the business side of our journalistic organizations. We considered it beneath us. We didn’t want to get our hands dirty. We were journalists, not mercenaries who sold ads or plotted business strategy. We practiced a strict separation of church and state – we didn’t even say hello to the biz side guys in the elevator.

It’s certainly true, then and now, that we must not let advertising concerns influence our choice of stories or what we write in them. Tough stories still have to be done, letting the chips fall where they may. But, in my view, it is a mistake for journalists to abdicate responsibility for the strategic direction of the media companies we work for, or to steer clear of new product development. Who, after all, knows the information needs of the audience better than the journalists who are out there reporting, blogging, and interacting with our various publics?

Don’t say such matters are not in your job description. Don’t say they’re above your pay grade. That attitude helped to create some of the problems we’re now seeing in the media world. Now, more than ever, we need to be part of the solution, part of the unfolding process to sustain quality journalism in the years ahead. We need to bring journalistically inspired ideas and journalistic values to the business of journalism. War is too important to leave to the generals.

In your year and a half at the CUNY J-School, you’ve learned a lot about technology. But technology is only a means to a greater end. We must all learn to harness technology – and entrepreneurship – to the cause of great journalism. We must break stories. We must do investigative reporting to uncover wrongdoing. We must do story-telling narratives. We must provide understanding, meaning, synthesis, context, insight – and on our best days something approaching wisdom. Even in a link economy, there must be something worth linking to.

Yes, I know the next year or two look challenging. But I’m confident your generation will be a force for great change. You are on your way, and we are proud of you. We know you will do well, bringing honor to yourselves, to our School, and to our profession. I thank you for the privilege of being your dean.

Tags: Class of 2010, commencement