Another major journalism school is starting a search for a new leader. The City University of New York plans to announce that Stephen B. Shepard, the founding dean of its journalism program, is stepping down at the end of the year.

Mr. Shepard, who joined CUNY in 2005 to help start a journalism school, plans to step down after the commencement in December. He said that he expected to remain a professor there and work on special projects like the university’s journalism book imprint.

The university is expected to announce the news on Monday.

“It just feels like the right time,” Mr. Shepard said of his resignation. “The school is well established now. We’ve had six graduating classes. It just seems like the right time to turn it over to somebody else.”

The announcement comes at a time when Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism is also searching for a new leader. Nicholas Lemann, the dean of Columbia’s journalism school, who led the program through a turbulent decade as digital media forced sweeping changes in the industry, said in October that he was stepping down at the end of the academic year. Columbia has yet to announce his replacement.

Mr. Shepard, a City College graduate, helped start the graduate journalism school after working for many years in magazines, including stints as a senior editor at Newsweek and editor in chief at BusinessWeek. The school opened in August 2006. During his tenure, he raised $25 million in academic programs and student scholarships.

In 2012, he published a memoir called “Deadlines and Disruption: My Turbulent Path From Print to Digital.”

As the school establishes a search committee to find a new dean, Mr. Shepard talked about the varied skills needed to run a journalism school in a rapidly changing landscape.

“You have to have traditional values of good journalism as we know it,” Mr. Shepard said. “You also have to be conversant with the new media world. And you have to be a fund-raiser and you have to be a manager.” He added that one of the biggest challenges was to find a dean interested in how to make journalism financially sound as well.

Mr. Shepard said, “One additional factor is to get people thinking about new business models, which support quality journalism in the digital age.”

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/cuny-journalism-program-to-lose-dean/?partner=rss&emc=rss