Culling lessons from his own newspaper experience, Howard Ziff taught a generation of students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst the craft of journalism and, not incidentally, how to reach for lives as riveting as his celebrated classes.

“He was on stage in the classroom,’’ said Larry Carpman, a former student of Mr. Ziff’s who now runs Carpman Communications in Boston. “He had this incredible ability to teach not just the mechanics of journalism, but the benefits of having passion in life. If passion can be taught, he knew how to do it.’’

Four decades ago, Mr. Ziff returned from Illinois to his home state to build the university’s journalism program. A childhood in Holyoke, an education at Amherst College, and invaluable experience as a reporter and editor at the Chicago Daily News combined to make him the most charismatic and electric professor most students encountered.

Mr. Ziff, whose former students fill newsrooms across the country, died of heart failure Tuesday in the Hospice at Fisher House in Amherst. He was 81 and had lived in Amherst for many years.

“He was able to combine the grit and the bustle of the streets with a strong interest in literature and philosophy and history,’’ said Ralph Whitehead Jr., a longtime friend and journalism professor at UMass Amherst who invoked the name of a legendary writer for The New Yorker magazine to measure Mr. Ziff’s range.

“If I were to name a journalist whose own work captured the spirit of Howard’s teaching,’’ Whitehead said, “it would have been A.J. Liebling, someone who moved back and forth easily between the pool hall and the reading room of the library.’’

During his days at Amherst College, Mr. Ziff studied with poet Robert Frost. In Chicago, at the City News Bureau and then at the Chicago Daily News, one of Mr. Ziff’s friends and colleagues was columnist Mike Royko.