Michele Steele is an on-air journalist, host, and sports and financial media expert who has spent her career making complicated stories feel urgent, accessible and worth watching.
Currently, Michele anchors for Big Ten Network, contributes to WGN and serves as a sports contributor to Weekend Edition on National Public Radio - bringing her signature blend of sports, business and personality to some of the most trusted names in media.
Most recently, she built Stocktwits TV from the ground up - becoming the fastest-growing vertical at the world's largest social investing platform. Hosting exclusive interviews with CEOs of publicly traded companies including Robinhood, OpenDoor, SoundHound and LendingClub, she brought credibility and journalistic rigor to a new generation of retail investor content. She would manage a team of producers, newsletter writers and a global team of writers to cover trending stories on the Stocktwits platform - newsletter open rates pushed above 30 percent during her tenure while Stocktwits news coverage brokered syndication deals with partners including Yahoo Finance.
Before Stocktwits, Michele spent over a decade at ESPN as a correspondent and anchor for SportsCenter, Sunday NFL Countdown, and NFL Live. She hosted ESPN Daily during the 2024 NFL season and created the SC Report, a daily multi-year franchise covering the stories fans needed to know. Her favorite assignments have included Caitlin Clark's debut with the Indiana Fever, Monday Night Football, the Scripps National Spelling Bee and the Warrior Games — featuring athletes from our nation's armed forces.
Prior to ESPN, Michele anchored a morning business newscast at Bloomberg Television broadcast to over 120 affiliates nationwide, ultimately becoming the network's first full-time sports reporter covering the business of the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL. Before Bloomberg, she launched the streaming video network at Forbes and was a regular contributor to Forbes' business programming on Fox News Channel. Her journalism career began at First Business, the nationally syndicated business television show, where she traveled to India to produce a four-part series on Asia's third-largest economy.
A Chicago native, Michele holds a bachelor's in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a master's in journalism from Columbia University. She is president of the Asian American Journalists Association Sports Task Force and was recognized by ESPN with a Volunteer of the Year award for her work with Special Olympics and Unified Sports.
She credits her dad for her sense of humor and for teaching her to always root for the underdog.
Michele has a busy on-air schedule but may be available for live event moderation, corporate and investor relations hosting, financial media commentary and content strategy.