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The Missouri School of Journalism names Martha Steffens, former editor of Binghamton, New York’s Press & Sun Bulletin and the San Francisco Examiner, to its new endowed chair in business and financial journalism.

Martha Steffens takes a career-long love of business reporting to the Missouri School of Journalism as the first holder of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers endowed chair in business and financial journalism. Steffens, 48, started reporting during the mid-'70s' "golden age of consumerism, when you'd write great stories about how not to buy a lemon car." Now, she says, "Economic writing is what investigative reporting was in the last two decades." A former finance news editor at the Los Angeles Times, Steffens spent five years at Binghamton, New York's Press & Sun-Bulletin, two as managing editor and three as executive editor. She then became the first executive editor of the San Francisco Examiner under its new owners, the Fang family. Fired just weeks after the paper relaunched in November 2000, she stayed on for another year as a consultant. Among her goals, she says, is to teach journalists math. "It's really clear that our strong verbal skills mask a lack of understanding of numbers."