About | Renita D. Young

Renita Young has a couple theories about Purpose. If we pay close attention to what children naturally gravitate toward, it'll give us an indication of who they'll become when they grow up. So when as a 5-year-old, Young walked around her childhood home with a tape recorder, telling everyone they were on "The Renita Show," she was onto something.

Likewise, Young believes that what we fear are often areas where we were born to have Influence and Purpose, and that we can conquer them by running toward them. She remembers her first fear being stage fright. Young would take on that fear by diving into community theater, choirs, speaking clubs and eventually, broadcast journalism. She also had a fear of math and anything else involving numbers. And while Young was preparing for graduate journalism school that would begin in 2008, she started to hear of an impending financial downturn. She feared not being prepared for the things that she wanted to do: buy a home, pay back college loan debt, save for retirement, etc. So during her first week at the Medill School of Journalism, when Professor Joe Mathewson asked the class if they wanted to cover the biggest story of their lives, the impending Great Recession, Young proudly raised her hand to join the Business Journalism cohort.

Today, Renita is Host of The Wrap and Senior Markets Correspondent at Schwab Network in Chicago. Formerly, she was a New York-based correspondent for Bloomberg Radio, TV and Quicktake, the company’s 24-hour streaming news platform.

Prior to Bloomberg, Young worked with Reuters where she covered commodities and launched #GoldWach, the company’s first personal finance-style social media show uncovering trends in the gold market. It aired on Twitter and gained an average of more than 150,000 views per weekend. She reported for Reuters TV and USA Today on milestone events including President Barack Obama’s farewell address and Chicago gun laws. During 2012, Young took Jet Magazine to the London Olympics by managing its Twitter feed (#JetOlympics2012); she also was a BBC TV and Radio contributor. Young launched her business news reporting career at K24-TV in Nairobi, Kenya’s first local 24-hour news network. Young has also worked with WBBM and WVON radio stations in Chicago, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune in Louisiana and AOL.com, among other media companies.

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A native Chicagoan, Young holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and English from DePaul University and an MS in Broadcast Journalism specializing in Business from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.

An Active National Association of Black Journalists member, Young co-chaired the Business Journalism Task Force and helped launch the new NABJ Entrepreneur Network as Co-chair. She has served as president and secretary for the NABJ Chicago Chapter as well as a Baton Rouge Chapter mentor. She was also a board member for the Chicago Headline Club, the area’s branch of the Society of Professional Journalists, has been recognized in the Chicago Defender’s inaugural “Top 40 Under 40 to Watch” class. And in 2021, Young was recognized in the Most Influential People of African Descent Top 100 Under 40 Edition in support of the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024). Young resides in Jersey City, N.J., where she’s an avid volunteer at her church and in her community.