Hundreds of community newspapers around the city will soon have a new pool of content to fill their pages: a free news wire service that specializes in local coverage.

The catch is that the service will be written entirely by students, who enroll in the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism.

The wire service, to be edited by professionals, is the centerpiece of Stephen Shepard’s plan for the three semester school, which is opening its doors in the fall of 2006.

Mr. Shepard, 66, who previously edited Business Week for two decades, is building the school from scratch.

Another one of his ideas is to promise students paid summer internships, a perk not offered by journalism programs at New York University or Columbia University. CUNY is guaranteeing that students will earn at least $3,000 for the summer, whether they land paid or unpaid internships.

The stipend is part of his plan to attract to the school “under-represented” students, who are “not just racial and ethnic minorities but working-class students.” Diversity, Mr. Shepard said, means “economic-class diversity” and includes immigrants and military veterans.

The school will charge $3,200 a semester, an amount that does not include fees. The total for three semesters, $9,600, is less than a fourth of tuition paid by graduate journalism students at New York University, a private university.

Asked why city taxpayers should support a journalism school, Mr. Shepard said it would fill a “social” need.

“It’s very dangerous to have newspapers that don’t represent the communities they cover, because they don’t get covered properly if that’s the case,” he said.

Mr. Shepard works out of CUNY’s Graduate Center in Midtown on Fifth Avenue, which also houses the 24-hour CUNY cable TV network, channel 75. He’ll soon be making his way to the school’s future headquarters on 41st Street, in the old New York Herald Tribune building.

When Columbia University’s president, Lee Bollinger, wanted to overhaul the curriculum of his journalism school, he sought wisdom from a task force of 31 journalists – who naturally disagreed with one another. Mr. Shepard, who founded a business journalism fellowship at Columbia 30 years ago, was one of its members.

The CUNY chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, opted for a more streamlined approach. After a national search for a dean, he and the trustees picked Mr. Shepard, a City College graduate, and instructed him to design the curriculum and structure of the school.

Mr. Shepard said he has the answer to the craft-versus-substance question that plagued Columbia’s task force, which argued over how to infuse the curriculum with deeper knowledge content on subjects such as economics and history.

“It’s not about craft or substance, dammit,” Mr. Shepard said, his eyes aglow. “It’s about both. You don’t have to be a genius to see that.”

With that in mind, Mr. Shepard has structured his curriculum to look like a matrix. Students will pick one of three “media tracks” – print, broadcast, or new media – and then match it with a subject concentration, with a choice of urban reporting, business/economics, and health/medicine. In 2007, Mr. Shepard plans to add a fourth subject, arts/culture.

He also expects to teach a required course, called Journalistic Judgment, that will explore such knotty issues as use of confidential sources, plagiarism, and “attacks on the media.” Mr. Shepard could very well draw from his experiences at Business Week, which under his leadership was once barred by a federal judge from publishing a story based on confidential documents. He also had to deal with stock tips leaking out of the newsroom before they were published in the magazine.

He ultimately wants to hire 10 to 12 of what he calls core faculty, 10 to 15 full-time “consortial” faculty (from the CUNY system), and 15 to 20 adjuncts. The in-house faculty will probably include a Brooklyn College faculty member, Paul Moses; the chairman of the journalism department at Queens College, Wayne Svoboda, and the Bloomberg professor of business journalism at Baruch College, Sarah Bartlett.

The first-year class size is expected to be 50 students, a number Mr. Shepard wants to triple in four years. By the fourth year, the school will be serving 300 students at once during the fall semester, when two class years of students overlap.

While many journalism schools, including Columbia’s, have Web-based news services written by students, few of those programs focus attention on local neighborhoods and on getting picked up by the local papers, according to Jay Rosen, chairman of NYU’s journalism department from 1999 to 2004.

“It’s a very smart thing to do,” he said.