Our Team

Jane Sasseen

Executive Director

Jane Sasseen is an award-winning financial journalist with 30 years experience covering global business and economics from senior editorial posts in New York, Washington D.C. and Paris. A visiting professor in the Global Business Journalism program at Tsinghua University in Beijing in the fall of 2013, she became the founding executive director of the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York in January 2014.

Sasseen spent 15 years at BusinessWeek magazine, where she was senior editor for news, Washington bureau chief, and a national correspondent. She was also editor-in-chief of the politics and opinion channels of Yahoo News, the largest digital news site in the United States. Earlier in her career, Sasseen worked for nine years in Europe, writing for Newsweek, the Christian Science Monitor, the International Herald Tribune and others before joining London-based International Management magazine as Paris bureau chief.

More recently, she has written for The New York Times, The Economist Group, McKinsey & Company and others, in addition to doing extensive work on digital media and the future of journalism for the The Pew Research Center’s annual  State of the News Media report. Sasseen is the author of The Video Revolution, an analysis of how citizen-shot video is changing news coverage, for the Center for International Media Assistance, as well as  A Clash of Cultures: Hate Speech, Taboos, Blasphemy, and the Role of the News Media.

She is a recipient of the Gerald Loeb Award, the top prize for financial journalism in America. Investigative stories she has written or edited have also helped spark probes by the SEC and other civil and criminal authorities. Sasseen is a member of the advisory board of the International Center for Journalists and was a delegate to the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission on the Media.

Stephen B. Shepard

Faculty Advisor

Stephen B. Shepard was the Founding Dean of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY from 2005 to 2013. From 1984 to 2005, he was editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek, the largest business magazine in the world. Prior to that, he was senior editor for national affairs at Newsweek and editor of the Saturday Review.

An adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism from 1971 to 1976, he co-founded the school’s prestigious Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economic and Business Journalism, serving as its first director.  He was president of the American Society of Magazine Editors from 1992 to 1994. In 1999, Mr. Shepard was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame and received the Gerald Loeb Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award for business journalism. In 2000, he received the Henry Johnson Fisher Award, the magazine publishing industry’s highest honor. And in 2003, he won the President’s Award from the Overseas Press Club.

His journalistic memoir, Deadlines and Disruption: My Turbulent Path From Print to Digital, was published in September 2012 by McGraw-Hill.

Greg David

Faculty Advisor

Greg David is the director of the Business & Economics Reporting Program at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. He also writes a blog and weekly column for Crain’s New York Business. From 1985 to 2008, he was the editor of Crain’s, the leading source of information on the New York economy and the companies that make it the business capital of the world. He led the paper’s entry into the web and expanded its online coverage. He also created two daily newsletters covering local government and health care,  as well as  the successful “Future of New York” series of conferences and special reports.

Under his leadership, Crain’s New York Business won two Gerald Loeb Awards for excellence in financial journalism. Crain’s was also a repeat winner of the general excellence award of the Alliance of Area Business Publications. And in 2008, Crain’s won the award for general excellence from Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

In all, he spent 33 years with Crain Communications.

He is the author of Modern New York: The Life and Economics of a City, published in April 2012 by Palgrave Macmillan, which the Economist called the “fast-paced tale of the fall and rise of New York.”