Howard Ziff, longtime professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has died, he was 81.

Ziff passed away on April 10 at Hospice of The Fisher Home in Amherst with family at his side after a prolonged illness.

A lifelong reporter, Ziff is credited with creating the current journalism major at the university in the early 1970s. Before that point it was called journalistic studies within the English department. He retired from the university in ‘98.