Martha Steffens

Professor and Endowed Chair, University of Missouri
appearing on Panel 5: Journalists and Mass Atrocity Dec. 2, 16:30–17:45

Martha Steffens is a professor and endowed chair at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. She is also chair of the North American Committee of the International Press Institute and part of IPI’s Executive Board.

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 32 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.

In 2004, Steffens was a visiting professor in business journalism at Moscow State University which capped a multi-year outreach to Russian journalists, traveling thousands of miles in that country to promote independent media. Steffens then 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. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, she led the first-ever training in journalism for women.

In 2013, Steffens received SABEW’s President’s Award for Distinguished Service, at the organizations 50th anniversary celebration. She is co-author of “Reporting Disaster on Deadline” (Routledge, 2012). In 2015, she was named a distinguished graduate of Indiana University’s Ernie Pyle School of Journalism. In 2018, she will be part of a delegation of free press groups to conduct a “Press Mission to the US.”