The 2022 Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award recipient is Michelle Singletary, personal finance columnist for The Washington Post.
The Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes a journalist whose career exemplifies the consistent superior insight and professional skills necessary to further the understanding of business, financial and economic issues.
In 1992, Singletary began writing about bankruptcy and banking for The Post. Her nationally syndicated twice-weekly column, The Color of Money, was launched in 1997 to speak directly and authentically to Americans whose economic struggles are often overlooked. Over the past 25 years, her columns have guided readers to build up their savings, stay out of debt, steel themselves against stock market volatility, and be wary of cryptocurrency and get-rich-quick stock schemes.
Singletary infuses her columns with her experiences as a Black woman to give readers relatable information that empowers their financial confidence and opens their eyes to the pernicious myths about the causes of America’s racial wealth gap. In 2020, The Post celebrated her long and distinguished career at the paper with the Eugene Meyer Award, its highest journalistic honor.
In 2021, she won a Loeb Award for commentary for “Sincerely, Michelle,” a series on race and money. The series also landed her the 2021 National Association of Black Journalists award for commentary. She was the first-place winner in the general commentary portfolio of the 2022 Society for Features Journalism Excellence-in-Features awards.
Singletary has taken her financial advocacy beyond newsprint by founding Prosperity Partners Ministry, a monthly personal finance program at her church. She also teaches financial literacy to incarcerated individuals throughout the Maryland Correctional Enterprises system.
She is the author of four books on personal finance, and throughout her career, she has been a frequent contributor to CNN, NBC, NPR and PBS. Singletary graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park, and earned a master’s degree in business and management at Johns Hopkins University.
