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About Dean Shepard
Stephen B. Shepard is the founding dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at The City University of New York. The school, which opened in September 2006, offers an innovative three-semester MA degree in journalism.
From 1984 to 2005, Mr. Shepard was editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek, the largest business magazine in the world. During his tenure, BusinessWeek won many major journalism awards, including five National Magazine Awards (two for General Excellence), 11 Overseas Press Club Awards and four Gerald Loeb Awards.
BusinessWeek was a National Magazine Award finalist 23 times on Mr. Shepard’s watch— nine of those for General Excellence. Additionally, the magazine’s worldwide circulation grew 40 percent, to 1.2 million under Mr. Shepard’s editorial stewardship.
Mr. Shepard began his journalistic career in 1963 as an editorial trainee at The McGraw-Hill Companies, BusinessWeek’s parent. He joined the magazine in 1966, serving in various domestic and international posts for ten years. He was also an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism from 1971 to 1976, and co-founder and first director of the school's prestigious Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economic and Business Journalism.
Mr. Shepard left BusinessWeek in 1976 for Newsweek, where he was senior editor for national affairs. In 1981, he became editor of Saturday Review. He returned to BusinessWeek as executive editor in 1982 and became editor-in-chief in 1984.
In 1999, Mr. Shepard was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame and received the Gerald M. Loeb Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award for business journalism. In 2000, he received the Henry Johnson Fisher Award, the magazine publishing industry's highest honor. And in 2003, he won the President's Award from the Overseas Press Club. Mr. Shepard was president of the American Society of Magazine Editors from 1992 to 1994.
He served on the Board of Visitors at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism from 1998 to 2004. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Overseas Press Club, and the Century Association.
A native New Yorker, Mr. Shepard graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, received a bachelor's degree in engineering from the City College of New York and a master’s degree in engineering from Columbia University. He and his wife, Lynn Povich, have two adult children, Sarah and Ned.
Teaching Change, Amid Change
There are a lot advantages to being a new school.
We started life two years ago at a critical moment for the journalism profession – a time of profound, wrenching transition to the digital age. Some of it is not fun to watch: all those lay-offs, cutbacks in reporting, shrinking revenues, slumping stock prices, and anxiety over new business models.
But it is also a fascinating time of opportunity. There are new ways to do journalism and new tools to learn, from interactivity to multimedia.
In short, we now have a great chance to re-imagine journalism – and journalism education.
It is not easy. For a few benighted moments early in our planning, there was a bit of us against them: Defenders of the Faith vs. Apostles of the New who were out to "save" journalism.
We now know we're all in this together. As a new school, we have a new faculty with new thinking and a sophisticated new space with the latest technology. There is no entrenched attitude here, little resistance to change.
We accept that the future is not about traditional media vs. new media, about opinionated blogs vs. investigative reporting, about podcasts vs. the nightly news. The future will blend both – the new tools of the trade aligned with the eternal verities of good reporting, writing, critical thinking, values, and ethics.
Even more fundamental, we realize that journalism is slowly morphing from a product to a process, a conversation between content providers and news consumers. The people "formerly known as the audience" can now participate in an interactive, multimedia forum. Anyone can post a blog, shoot a video for YouTube, podcast, or file a dispatch as a citizen journalist.
We're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy. Journalists must be trained for this fast-evolving world.
Our students can still choose a media track specialty — whether print, broadcast, or interactive. And a student can still say, "I want to be a long-form writer for The New Yorker." To which we say: "God bless you! We have a great selection of courses and a terrific faculty to help you."
But we also say to those students that they must learn to be fluent across all media platforms. All students will learn to think in new ways, to choose the best ways to tell a story.
They will take a video camera on the street for some assignments. They will learn to blog, to write for a podcast, to prepare a slide show for a Web site. Why? Because those skills will make them better journalists. And, yes, because they likely won’t get a job without them.
The graduates of our inaugural class already are putting their in-demand skills to good use. Some two-thirds have full-time work with media outlets of all sizes and types. I'm confident our first batch of alumni already are having an impact on the changing media landscape — combining new media skills with traditional journalistic values.
Our faculty of seasoned journalists is getting an education, too, thanks to the efforts of Professor Jeff Jarvis, who heads our interactive program, and Associate Professor Sandeep Junnarkar.
I've sat in on faculty training sessions devoted to RSS, wikis, widgets, blogs, and something called Twitter (it’s a "micro-blogging" service that allows users to send short dispatches to a large number of folks at once). I'm an old magazine guy, but I love learning these new tricks of the trade.
Our curriculum continues to evolve. We’ve added a new concentration in international reporting, headed by Associate Professor Lonnie Isabel. Our goal is to train the overseas correspondents of the future, giving them the technological tools to set up bureaus around the world. These are vital skills to be teaching at a time when news organizations are consolidating bureaus even as quality reportage from abroad is more needed than ever.
The 70-plus members of our third class, which enters this fall, will experience a program in which the different media formats are increasingly converging — both a precursor to and a reflection of changes underway in the profession. I'm especially proud of a course we added last year taught by Professor Jarvis. It's called "Entrepreneurial Journalism," and it's open to all students.
Their assignment: Develop a new journalistic product that uses the new technologies – and come up with a business plan.
We recruited an outside panel, including venture capitalists, to judge the student work. We even offered seed money to the best ideas, thanks to a grant from the McCormick Foundation. I'm happy to report that several of the ideas seem viable.
In a way, we're teaching change. The next few years will change all of us — for the better, I hope. Hang on!
Stephen B. Shepard
Dean
