Retiring University of Missouri business journalism professor Marty Steffens has been named the 2026 winner of the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.
The Distinguished Achievement Award was established in 1993 to single out individuals who have made a significant impact on the field of business journalism and who have served as a nurturing influence on others in the profession.
Last year’s winner was Rebecca Blumenstein, now president of editorial at NBC News. The only other business journalism professor to receive the award was Jimmy Gentry, who was at Missouri, the University of Nevada and the University of Kansas. He received the award in 2003.
Steffens, the SABEW endowed chair, 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.
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 will be recognized at the SABEW annual conference in Philadelphia in May.
