Steve Schifferes

Steve Schifferes is Marjorie Deane Professor of Financial Journalism and director of the MA program in Financial Journalism at City University London. He created the program in 2009, the UK’s first course in business and economic journalism.

Steve’s major research interests include the role of the media in covering financial crises, the problem of financial literacy among news audiences, and the role of social media in news gathering. His edited collection, The Media and Financial Crises: Comparative and Historical Perspectives, was published by Routledge in 2014, and he is editing a forthcoming companion volume, The Media and Austerity. He was the principal investigator for a major three-year collaborative European Union research project, working with computer scientists across Europe to develop new tools to search social media for news, called Social Sensor.

As a practicing economic journalist at BBC news for 20 years, he has covered most of the major economic and financial crises from the 1987 crash to the 2008 global financial crisis. He was the lead producer for the week-long BBC News series of programs across television, radio, and the Internet marking the first anniversary of the Lehman crash in 2009. He also covered major economic summits (G8 and G20) and the Doha round of world trade talks. His online series on the Enron scandal and on the launch of the euro won major European media awards.

During a decade working for BBC news online, he played a major role in creating a business and economics section, developing new online tools to display data and live coverage of economic events such as the UK budget. He was also a BBC News online Washington correspondent during the Iraq war, and covered the Obama campaign during the 2008 US Presidential election.He started his journalism career as a documentary filmmaker in London weekend television, producing a major series on poverty (Breadline Britain), wealth (Fortune) and crime.

Steve was educated at Harvard where he was a National Merit Scholar and received his BA in Social Studies. He did graduate work at the University of Warwick where he received an MA in Comparative Labor History. He has been a Knight- Bagehot Fellow in Economic Journalism at Columbia University and a fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University.