Some would say he’s retracing his career, others that he’s been reincarnated. But Stephen Shepard said his new job includes both, as well as a bit of the unknown.

“It’s the most difficult job I’ve ever held – it’s really daunting,” the former editor in chief of Business Week said yesterday. “But it’s exciting. How many opportunities does a person get in a lifetime to build something from scratch?”

This particular opportunity came from a convergence of developments. Mr. Shepard decided to retire from the magazine in early 2005. At about the same time, the City University of New York was weighing the idea of opening a graduate school of journalism. Various colleges in the CUNY system wanted to start journalism schools, but the chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, decided to create a self-standing school.

“The proposed school had everything to stir my soul,” Mr. Shepard said. “It would be about journalism, my lifelong profession. It would be based in New York – I am a rabid New Yorker. And it would be a new enterprise in public education, in fact, the only publicly funded graduate journalism school in the Northeast.”

The school will have a first-rate faculty, Mr. Shepard said. It will offer state-of-the-art facilities in the historic New York Herald-Tribune building in Midtown. (The paper was shuttered in 1966.) Its three-semester curriculum for a master’s degree will cover print, broadcast, and online journalism. Its courses will emphasize ethics and good judgment. It will launch a community news service to cater to the needs of neighborhood publications and small newspapers. It will require students to complete internships at news organizations.

And its fees will be affordable. State residents would pay $7,500 a year, and out-of-state students would pay double that.

To the degree that any institution is shaped by its founder’s sensibility, the new school is certain to bear Mr. Shepard’s imprint.

That imprint was shaped by his childhood in the West Bronx. He was the only son of William Shepard, an accountant, and Ruth Tanner. His parents pretty much left him to himself as he attended the Bronx High School of Science, but his father insisted that everybody in the family sign on to his passion, the Yankees.

Stephen Shepard and his older sister, Barbara, would attend raucous games with his father, and with his cousin, Richard Shepard, who became an acclaimed reporter for the New York Times. Journalism wasn’t particularly on his mind in those years. But writing was.

He still remembers teachers who taught him how to construct a good declarative sentence and the importance of good grammar.

“By the time I got to City College, I was a pretty decent writer,” Mr. Shepard said. “I loved writing.”

He was also enthralled with science, largely the result of his closeness to an uncle, Lou Tanner, a chemical engineer who encouraged his nephew to take interest in some of the great scientific developments of the time, such as the launching of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, in 1957.

Mr. Shepard got to meld his love of writing and science at City College, where he studied mechanical engineering, when he became editor of Vector, the college’s science magazine. The publication received a national award during his stewardship.

As he pursued a master’s degree in engineering at Columbia University, however, Mr. Shepard became increasingly disenchanted with the subject.

“I was smart enough to understand the subject, but I wasn’t smart enough to do anything creative in engineering,” he said.

His creative juices began to flow at his first job at a trade magazine, Product Engineering, put out by the Mc-Graw-Hill Companies.

“It felt wonderful to be there. I had found something that I loved doing, something that turned me on,” Mr. Shepard said. “I wrote about the space program. I wrote about technology.”

His fluency with technology led to a job at Business Week, another Mc-Graw-Hill publication. Within two months, Mr. Shepard produced his first cover story, on automobile safety. More cover stories followed.

He eventually won an assignment as a foreign correspondent. So he was off

to London, where, in addition to being welcomed as a journalist, Mr. Shepard found himself having to explain America. When Robert F. Kennedy was killed, British friends offered condolences. When Apollo 11 landed, they congratulated him.

Back in New York after two years in London, Mr. Shepard began teaching part-time at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. His specialty was business, of course, and that led to an invitation to create the Bagehot Program in Economics and Business Journalism (later renamed the Knight-Bagehot Program).

He wasn’t much older than some of his students, but Mr. Shepard possessed something they didn’t: experience.

That experience opened the door to a five-year stint at Newsweek and a year as editor of Saturday Review, before he became editor of Business Week. During his 20-year tenure, Mr. Shepard expanded the magazine’s international coverage. Recognizing the changes technology was affecting, he deepened coverage of it.

He also made a strong case that productivity increases were allowing higher economic growth without inflation. He found a kindred spirit in Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, with whom Mr. Shepard would have lengthy informal discussions.

Mr. Shepard had fans of his own, among them Chancellor Goldstein, who shared his view that the city needed a new journalism school.

“I felt that it simply wasn’t right that there was no publicly supported journalism school in New York,” Mr. Shepard said. “Columbia and New York Universities are very good private schools, but priced out of the affordability range of most New Yorkers. I felt that a publicly funded school of journalism needed to be there. So from the very beginning, I had a sense of mission.”

He received strong support from his wife, Lynn Povich – daughter of the legendary sports writer Shirley Povich – and their two children. A daughter, Sarah, is in the movie industry, and a son, Ned, is an electronic music composer. They had wondered what Mr. Shepard would do after his retirement from Business Week.

“I was actually returning to something that I loved – teaching,” Mr. Shepard said. “I’d never forgotten those years at Columbia.”

His engaging management style had proved handy in academia.

“I have no trouble being collegial,” he said. His collegiality is likely to be tested as he creates chairs and professorships at the school. The first class will begin in September, and it will have 50 students, who will attend classes on two floors, encompassing 40,000 square feet of space, of the Herald-Tribune building.

“I think there’s good DNA in those walls,” Mr. Shepard said.