New York’s New J-School

It may not have the history or prestige of Columbia, but it doesn’t come with the sticker shock either

Stephen B. Shepard was nearing the end of a 20-year reign as editor in chief of BusinessWeek in 2004 when an offer crossed his desk: to be the first dean of the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism.

It had been more than 40 years since Mr. Shepard had been in a CUNY classroom — as an undergraduate at City College. But over the years, he had been involved with journalism education at Columbia University, first as an adjunct professor, then as a curriculum adviser to the university’s president. And this was CUNY, the college that started more than 150 years ago as a place where children of immigrants and blue-collar workers could afford an education. Mr. Shepard knew that being at CUNY would not only bring him back to his roots and help fulfill a mission he deeply believed in, but also let him forge a new way of teaching journalism at a time of rapid change in the profession, a point at which so many things were up for grabs — even the very definition of journalist.

When Mr. Shepard welcomes the Graduate School of Journalism’s first class of 50 students this fall, he will invite them to step into history. Housed in the old New York Herald Tribune building, where the likes of Tom Wolfe and Walter Lippmann once banged out newspaper copy, the school will be just blocks from some of the profession’s oldest and most storied institutions: The New York Times, the Associated Press, the New York Post, NBC, CBS, Time Inc.

But the school must come to terms with an industry in flux. The technological upheaval and ethical wrangling within the modern-day press have left all of journalism grappling with fundamental questions. How best can the news media gather and distribute stories? What is to be done about plagiarism, confidential sources, and public hostility toward the press? Who are these bloggers, and are they a threat or an asset? And how can the industry make money when so much news is given away free?

The soul-searching has spilled into academe, where graduate schools from the University of California at Berkeley to Northwestern University to Columbia are revising curricula and testing new programs in an effort to create journalists prepared for a world where information is globally complex, profit pressure is never-ending, and news moves at Internet speed. The Carnegie Corporation of New York is bankrolling a number of programs to infuse more intellectual rigor into journalism-school curricula, and in January, Steven Brill, founder of The American Lawyer and Court TV, and his wife, Cynthia, gave Yale University $1-million to start a journalism program.

But it won’t be a journalism school. Mr. Brill has publicly expressed disdain for journalism schools — a fairly common sentiment in what has historically been a learn-on-the-job profession. Instead, the idea at Yale is to add journalistic training to the liberal-arts core of a student’s education. That is a far different philosophy from CUNY’s, but what all of these new projects have in common is a deep concern about the direction of the news industry.

“The world is getting more complicated, and there are a million sources of information,” says Mr. Shepard. “But what’s missing is insight and wisdom.”

Cheaper Alternative

That is part of the reason CUNY is getting into the game. CUNY is also hoping the school will play a role in the university’s continuing campaign to bolster its academic prestige — a long-term strategy that has included raising admissions standards, recruiting new college presidents, clamping down on remedial courses, and creating an honors college.

But ask Mr. Shepard why he is here, and the first answer out of his mouth is something else. “There needs to be a publicly funded graduate school of journalism in this part of the world,” says Mr. Shepard, who took up his CUNY post last April. “There’s not one in the entire Northeast, which means if you don’t have $35,000, you’re out of luck. And that just doesn’t seem right.”

And then he segues into his diversity talk, a frequent theme: “People complain all the time that the profession isn’t diverse enough. And I don’t mean diversity just in the sense of racial and ethnic diversity, but I mean in class terms, too. Working-class people, immigrants, people who have served in the military. The press in this country is not very representative.”

He produces some statistics: Only 13.4 percent of the 54,150 journalists who work at newspapers in the United States are members of minority groups, compared with 32.8 percent of the population. In supervisory positions, the percentage falls to 10 percent, and magazines are even worse: only 6.1 percent of professionals at the top 30 magazines by circulation are minority journalists. “One of the reasons,” he says, “is that graduate schools of journalism are very expensive.”

Tuition and fees for the three semesters required for a master’s at CUNY will be about $11,275 for New York residents, less than one-third of the total sticker price at crosstown rivals Columbia ($38,500 for a one-year master’s program) and New York University ($40,500 for a year-and-a-half program). Lower costs should help attract a more-diverse student body; however, CUNY does not yet have statistics on the economic or racial makeup of its first applicant pool.

Alma Mater

When CUNY’s chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, decided affordable graduate journalism education was an unmet need in New York City — a place that considers itself the media capital of the world — and that CUNY should do something about it, he convened a committee of professors from the university’s colleges that teach undergraduate journalism. The recommendation: a one-year, skills-intensive program focused on urban reporting leading to a master’s in journalism.

Mr. Goldstein wasn’t quite sure that would be enough time, or enough depth, to cover everything a journalist needs. So he decided to hire a dean and let him consider what the school should be. Why Mr. Shepard? “I was impressed with what he did at BusinessWeek, building it up to the powerhouse it is today,” says Mr. Goldstein. “Plus, he is a graduate of City College. I love the idea that someone who really has a passion for this university would bring his experience back to this school.”

The son of an accountant and a homemaker, Mr. Shepard had a lower-middle-class childhood in the Bronx, where he attended the Bronx High School of Science. He went to City College in 1956 (back then, it was free) and, caught up in the post-Sputnik fervor of the day, majored in engineering, even though he wanted to be a journalist. After earning a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Columbia, Mr. Shepard went to work for McGraw-Hill, where he eventually wound up at one of the company’s magazines, BusinessWeek. After 20 years as editor, he says he is excited by the “different kind of hard” of building a school from scratch.

Once Mr. Shepard took the job, he reconvened the journalism professors who had advised the chancellor and brought in some industry experts to think about what the school should be, and for how long. The result is a year-and-a-half program (a summer internship is required) with more choice of subject concentrations and a heavier bent toward new media, like interactive online reports and blogs.

Lengthening the program means students have to ante up more tuition, but Mr. Shepard and his committee thought that was necessary in order to get in more classes on the issues students will cover as journalists. Students pick one of three tracks: health and medicine, business and economics, or urban affairs, and take a sequence of three classes in that specialty. (Mr. Shepard hopes to add arts and culture in year two, and international reporting further down the road.)

The decision to infuse more “content” is a major nod to a number of other graduate journalism schools, which in recent years have beefed up the teaching of the subjects journalists and de-emphasized the nuts and bolts of how to report and write — what professors call “craft.”

But Mr. Shepard is adamant about the need to teach both, in balance. Each of the first two semesters at CUNY will include a rigorous course, “Craft of Journalism,” which will send students into the neighborhoods of New York to find and report stories, and then bring them back to a 70-seat newsroom to be dissected by professor-editors, including Wayne Svoboda, a former writer for Time magazine and The Economist who will move over from CUNY’s Queens College to oversee the school’s print-journalism component.

That sort of on-the-ground training is still necessary, says Mr. Shepard, partly because of who goes to graduate school in journalism (a fair number of career switchers and people who didn’t major in journalism as undergraduates), and partly because the profession itself has severely pulled back from providing that sort of training itself. Mr. Shepard laments that with conglomerated media companies under pervasive profit pressure, the sort of training program he benefited from at McGraw-Hill rarely exists anymore.

In fact, a 2002 survey sponsored by the Council of Presidents of National Journalism Organizations and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation found that 34 percent of journalists are dissatisfied with opportunities for training and professional development — more than are dissatisfied with salary or promotion opportunities.

But what current journalists wish they had in the newsroom and what future journalists are willing to pay for in the classroom are two different things. And not everyone is convinced that the market can support another journalism school. Undergraduate programs are increasingly following the money and emphasizing public relations and advertising over reporting and writing, says Lee B. Becker, a journalism professor at the University of Georgia who runs annual-enrollment and job surveys as director of the James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research. “Journalism is a mature industry, especially print,” he says. “If you don’t have growth in terms of employment opportunities, you can’t assume growth in educational programs.”

Blogging Professors

Going where the jobs are is part of the reason CUNY’s curriculum includes a heavy dose of new media — also billed as “interactive” journalism. “When you start a school from scratch,” says Mr. Shepard, “you get the luxury of thinking about these things.” To lead that slice of the program, he hired Jeff Jarvis, one of the founders of Entertainment Weekly who in recent years has blogged his way to cyberfame with BuzzMachine. (In fact, some prospective students say Mr. Jarvis is the reason they got interested in the program in the first place.)

Every student will take at least one new-media class, the point of which is not only to teach Internet reporting and online production, but also to wake students up to the reality of a world in which a titan like Dan Rather can be brought down by bloggers. And in an era when each morning’s newspaper brings word of layoffs at newspaper companies, Mr. Jarvis will also teach a seminar class that, among other things, requires students to develop a proposal for a new-media company. “We’ve got to find the new business model to support journalism,” he says. “This is the first time since William Randolph Hearst that young journalists can think entrepreneurially.”

Mr. Shepard will teach “Journalistic Judgment,” one of two required courses that strive to get at the broader legal and moral frameworks of journalism. Other classes will be taught by faculty members culled from CUNY’s existing undergraduate journalism programs — people like Linda Prout, the Emmy-nominated producer who will leave City College to direct the graduate school’s broadcast component; Paul Moses, the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaperman who teaches at Brooklyn College; and Eric Alterman, a columnist for The Nation and MSNBC who is also a Brooklyn College professor. And Sarah Bartlett, a business journalist, will move over from CUNY’s Baruch College.

More Marketing

When the graduate school opens, Baruch will end its own master’s program in business journalism. That master’s degree hasn’t generated much enthusiasm from students in recent years — hardly a good sign — but administrators say the problem was a lack of marketing.

That’s not an issue with the new school, says Mr. Shepard, who, for a director of admissions, poached Michele Rabin from Berkeley’s graduate journalism school. Since September, Ms. Rabin has been leading the recruiting effort with campus visits, direct mailings, Web sites, and brochures.

For the required internship, the school is in a great neighborhood for finding work — Reuters, the Daily News, MTV, Newsweek, Conde Nast, News Corporation, the Hearst Corporations, and, yes, BusinessWeek are all within walking distance — and Mr. Shepard says employers are already calling to ask about his students (who, for the time being, he has to say, don’t exist). If the internship doesn’t pay, then CUNY — always aware of the economic burden on its students — will: a $3,000 stipend for the summer. A $4-million gift from the sisters of the retired New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs (Punch) Sulzberger will help pay for the internships — and up to 20 scholarships each year.

Mr. Shepard figures it will take five years to build the school up to full capacity: 150 students per class, which means 300 in the overlapping fall semester. At that size, it will be one of the largest graduate schools of journalism in the country. Back in 2004, when Mr. Shepard, on the cusp of retirement, was still considering whether to take the job, he had a conversation with his friend, the journalist Michael Kinsley. “We had dinner, and he said, ‘You have to do it,’” Mr. Shepard recalls. “I said, ‘Why is that?’ He said, ‘To be the fourth dean, well, I don’t know. But to be first dean of a new graduate school of journalism, that’s really something.’”

http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 52, Issue 24, Page A10