Rochelle Riley

Rochelle Riley grew up in Tarboro, North Carolina where she was raised in part by her grandfather Willie Bennie Pitt and grandmother Lowney Hilliard Pitt. She said in her acceptance speech at the Ida B. Wells Award that her grandmother's curiosity influenced her own curiosity about current events and their impact on our lives. She has one daughter. Rochelle attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she majored in journalism and English. In 2008, she completed a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan.

• Illustration — Riley speaking at a City of Detroit event in 2022 Rochelle Riley has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, CNN and FOX2. She has worked as an editor or reporter at The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, the Dallas Times Herald and The (Louisville) Courier-Journal. In Louisville, she was deputy managing editor, 1992–96, associate editor and columnist, 1996–2000; and from 2000 to 2019, she was a Detroit Free Press columnist. In 1985, when she was with The Dallas Morning News, she founded the DFW/ABC Urban Journalism Workshop to train minority youth to be journalists.

Her columns about former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick were a part of the entry that won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in local reporting. She is also notable for her excellence in journalism and for mentoring future journalists to ensure that newsrooms reflect the diversity of their communities, which is why she won the Ida B. Wells Award from the National Association of Black Journalists and Northwestern University. She also is known for advocating for press freedom as a member of the International Press Institute and the NABJ Global Journalism Task Force. She has spent years crusading for better lives for children, government accountability, improved race relations and increased adult literacy, by helping to raise nearly $2 million for literacy causes in Michigan.

Riley was known as one of the top African-American journalists in the United States; she has received several awards for her nationally syndicated columns. When she was named deputy managing editor of The Courier-Journal in Louisville in 1992, Riley became the newspaper's first African-American news executive.