Marty Steffens

As the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) endowed chair, MARTHA STEFFENS teaches business and financial journalism, economics for journalists, and entrepreneurial journalism. Steffens joined the faculty at Missouri in 2002 after a distinguished 30-year career in the news industry. In her outreach to journalists, she has organized more than 100 workshops for journalists in 28 countries. In the U.S. and Canada alone, Steffens has trained more than 500 journalists in understanding concepts from covering local business to reporting on U.S. financial markets, as well as personal finance and local economies. She was a visiting professor in business journalism at Moscow State University in 2004, which capped a multi-year outreach to Russian journalists, traveling thousands of miles in that country to promote independent media. Steffens next turned her attention to Middle Eastern journalists, conducting multiple training sessions in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar to ready journalists for their role in covering democratic elections. Steffens assisted Yemeni Journalists Society in writing an ethics code for media workers in that nation. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, she led the first-ever training for women journalists. Steffens has also lectured extensively in China and Taiwan on topics ranging from business reporting to investigative research to curricula for journalism schools. In 2014, she will train economic journalists in Ethiopia, Kenya, the Republic of Georgia and India. In the U.S., Steffens had organized more than 50 workshops for business journalists through her work with SABEW, the leading organization of financial journalists in the world. She led a revision of SABEW’s ethics code in 2008, and helped revise it again in 2014. Steffens serves as one of two U.S. members on the executive board of the International Press Institute, a 60-year old press-freedom organization. For IPI, she has organized journalist training in Taiwan and Jordan. Steffens was also chief editor of the 2011 IPI Report: Media and Money, and the 2013 Report: Reflections on the Arab Spring.