Boston University journalism professor Lou Ureneck, who was officially named to replace outgoing department chairman Robert Zelnick, said his professional and academic experience would guide his decision making as chairman, and those who know him said that experience would serve him well.

Ureneck, who was the assistant managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer before becoming a faculty member in 2003, said he will give weight to his colleagues’ views, in addition to promoting his own vision. He also said policies would go through thorough vetting with the faculty before it was implemented.

“The faculty in a department — journalism, history, math, whatever it happens to be — is the principal planner and direction setter for its curriculum,” he said. “So it will be a combination of faculty priorities along with my contributions.”

Ureneck said one of the key missions he will undertake during his tenure as chairman will be to continue to work with the department to improve the educational experience of both graduate and undergraduate students.

“On the graduate side, one of the things we’re involved in deeply right now is an improvement of the lineup of concentrations we have,” he said. “What I mean by concentrations is areas of expertise that students would develop along with their journalism — for example: science, business and economics, international reporting, arts and criticism and so forth.”

Ureneck said he wants to maintain a high level of excellence within the College of Communication.

Ureneck said he envisions a multimedia journalism that uses the internet to its advantage to disseminate information, combining techniques from newsprint, magazine and broadcast journalism.

“This is the way journalism is moving … so we want to make sure that our students have the opportunity to learn how to do that well,” he said. “This is an area where I think we’ll [have] curriculum development almost immediately [and] over the next several years.”

The difficulty with this approach for faculty, Ureneck said, will be to think their way through the idea. They must continue to be leaders of fundamental journalistic principles and high-quality journalistic product — “public-spirited journalism,” he called it — along with the need to adapt to the new environment journalism faces in the “information age.”

Ureneck said his past experience in both the professional and academic world will deeply inform how he and the department’s faculty transform these proposals into a concrete reality. Ureneck said there are three specific ways in which his past experiences will influence how he will act as chairman.

Before coming to the university, Ureneck was also the editor and vice president of The Portland Press Herald in Maine, where he said the paper fostered excellent community relations.

“The paper, I think, was valuable to readers in that it focused a reading community on a particular set of issues that led to reform in particular areas,” he said. “I think that community building aspect is important when we start talking about the internet, because on the internet, what we’re doing in large part is building communities around information needs.”

Ureneck also spent a year as editor-in-residence at Harvard University’s Neiman Foundation, where he met many foreign journalists who had risked their lives doing their jobs, something Ureneck said had a profound impact on him.

Howard Shapiro, the current travel editor and Broadway critic of the Inquirer, said Ureneck’s personal and professional qualities make him perfect for the job.

“If you’re talking about someone who is going to succeed Robert Zelnick … you are talking about the leadership qualities Lou has already shown in newsrooms,” he said.

Shapiro said there are definitive qualities Ureneck displayed at the Inquirer that will manifest themselves positively as journalism department chairman.

He said Ureneck was able to “put out fires, and put them out well” on a day-to-day basis, but was also in charge of long-range planning for the newspaper, and was able to plan with a consensus opinion of his colleagues.

COM Dean John Schulz said he is as proud of Ureneck’s success in the academic world as the professional, and looks forward to working with him in the years to come.

“Since coming to Boston University, he has again risen rapidly in responsibility while demonstrating outstanding ability as a teacher, high energy and imagination and great skills as an administrator,” Schulz said in an email, “both as director of the journalism graduate programs and as the person in charge of the graduate major in business and economics.”

Schulz said optimism abounds about the prospects for Ureneck’s future as chairman.

“The idea of making him acting chair of the department has been greeted with great enthusiasm by the journalism faculty,” Schulz said.

Ureneck said he has not spoken with Zelnick about the outgoing chairman’s suggestion to sever the journalism department from mass communication, but he said that although the departments have different missions, they go hand-in-hand in the business realities of mass media.