Book Review: Deadlines and Disruption—My Turbulent Path from Print to Digital

Abstract

Stephen B. Shepard Deadlines and Disruption-My Turbulent Path from Print to Digital. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013. 339 pp.CounterpointJournalism education is so seldom treated seriously in any significant detail outside of scholarly books and journals that Journalism & Mass Communication Educator is pretty much compelled to pay attention when someone such as Stephen B. Shepard, founding dean of the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, does so. In Deadlines and Disruption, Shepard devotes sixty-eight pages to journalism education generally and the founding of the CUNY program specifically.Shepard should be a particularly insightful thinker and writer on journalism education. He was senior editor at Newsweek, editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek from 1984 to 2005, founding codirector of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowships in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University, and, from 1992 to 1994, president of the American Society of Magazine Editors.Shepard devotes the first 185 pages of his book to his own career and, to a much lesser extent, his life. By any standard, he had a very successful and satisfying career and, at least to him, an engaging one. We should all be so lucky. However, Shepard never quite can hold the reader in describing any of his friends, coworkers, relatives, or even stories he worked on. It's all so bland, sometimes general, and occasionally predictable that the typical reader probably will fail to remember anything in the first 185 pages other than this: half his Jewish family changed their names from Shapiro to Shepard, Stephen has two engineering degrees, and his second wife is a former coworker related to Maury Povich. Shepard is neither famous nor interesting, and one wonders if, while writing it, he had a Max Schumacher moment (I'm tired of pretending to write this book about my maverick days in the great early years of television. Every goddamned executive fired from a network in the last years has written this dumb book about the great early years of television. And nobody wants a dumb, damn book about the early days of television.) about magazines.CUNY chancellor Matt Goldstein told Shepard early on, I don't want just another journalism school, but as one reads through the sixty-eight-page J-school narrative, one is never convinced that CUNY ended up with anything very special by the time it opened in August 2006. Other J-schools also were heavily into new media and convergence by then, and other J-schools had long required, or essentially required, journalism students to complete internships. …