Martha Moutoux Steffens shifted her focus after 30 years in newspapers to education, sharing her expertise with college students at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and with hundreds of professionals around the world looking to expand both their skills and their news organizations’ reach.
Her years in news equipped her for her second act in academia. Steffens was an editor and reporter at the Evansville Courier, the Dayton Daily News, the Orange County Register, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Minneapolis Star and the Los Angeles Times, where she was an editor on the business desk.
Later, she was executive editor of the Press & Sun Bulletin in Binghamton, N.Y. Steffens ended her newspaper career as executive editor of the San Francisco Examiner.
In 2002, she joined the University of Missouri as the Society of American Business Editors and Writers Endowed Chair, teaching business and financial journalism. Steffens’ interest in supporting journalism around the world led her to the Middle East to train journalists to cover elections, to Macedonia to train business journalists and to Saudi Arabia to conduct the first-ever training sessions for women journalists. To date, she has organized more than 100 workshops for journalists in 28 countries on topics from local business reporting to covering global financial markets.
Steffens has served on the boards of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism and CBS MarketWatch. Earlier this year, she was named to the executive board of the International Press Institute, an organization that seeks to monitor and support press freedom around the world. She is a member of journalism’s alumni board.
Steffens received the Society of American Business Editors and Writers President’s Award in 2013. She is co-author of Reporting Disaster on Deadline and author of the upcoming Dimension Reporting.