Women’s History Month Profile: Stephanie Riegel

03/14/2016

Stephanie Riegel, a 1988 Manship School graduate, is an award-winning reporter and editor of the Baton Rouge Business Report, as well as host of “Out to Lunch,” a weekly radio show on WRKF-FM featuring a roundtable of local entrepreneurs and businesses.

 

Riegel plans and generates content for the biweekly business magazine, including an opinion column, and for the twice-daily online newsletter, the Daily Report. She also delivers a news segment on WAFB Channel 9 each Monday morning called “It’s Your Business.”

 

After graduating with a journalism degree from LSU in 1988, Riegel earned her master’s degree in history from Tulane University in 1990. She began her career as a staff writer for Gambit Weekly and later New Orleans CityBusiness. Riegel then switched gears to broadcast for 12 years as she worked as a news reporter for WWL-TV in New Orleans.

 

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 brought Riegel and her family to Baton Rouge, where she freelanced for The Advocate, Country Roads magazine and the Business Report. After a one-year stint as food editor at The Advocate, Riegel was hired on full-time at the Business Report in 2012.

 

Riegel is a member of the Manship School Alumni Board, the Baton Rouge Rotary Club, Hope Ministries and on the board of directors for Adult Literacy Advocates. She has also won numerous gold and silver awards from the Association of Area Business Publications (AABP) for her Business Report articles.

 

Until recently, Riegel says, she hasn’t thought much about Women’s History Month, which shows just how far women have come today. As she gets older, though, she has come to realize the importance of women’s history because it wasn’t long ago when women were not treated equally, even in her own field of mass communication.

 

“I can tell you that reporting on business in Baton Rouge, there are still many fields in which the culture is extremely chauvinistic,” Riegel says. “I don’t know if it’s that bad everywhere, but down here in the Deep South, the Good ‘Ol Boys network is alive and well. So I think Women’s History Month is a good time to reflect on how far women have come but also how far we have to go.”