|180px|thumb|left|Jim Shaffer
Jim Shaffer is a former media executive who is now dean of the School of Business at the University of Southern Maine. His 30+ year media career took him to Minneapolis, Baltimore, Buffalo, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland, Maine. He was in LA from 1983 through 1989, where he was CFO of the Los Angeles Times. He came to Maine in 1991 to be CEO of Maine-based Guy Gannett Communications, which was based in Portland and had TV, newspaper, and other media properties in seven states. After the sale of Guy Gannett in 1999, he served briefly as CEO of Clickshare Service Corp., and he studied leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In addition to being dean, Jim describes himself as a student and teacher of adaptive leadership. During the 1990s, Shaffer helped lead newspaper industry trade group efforts to adapt the industry to the Internet marketplace. This included serving as chairman of a future-watching subcommittee of the Newspaper Association of America in the late 1990s. Earlier, Shaffer was executive vice president of the Chicago Sun-Times Co., and an executive in various roles with Cowles Communications Inc., of Minneapolis, Minn. He holds an M.B.A. from Indiana University and an undergraduate engineering degree from Purdue University.