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Meet our Editor-In-Chief

An award-winning journalist with more than 30 years experience, Lou Carlozo brings to Qwoted a wealth of accomplishments in leadership, storytelling, multimedia reporting, editing and mentoring.

Lou most recently served as managing editor at Government CIO, where he led an overhaul of web page content for the Veterans Administration. Just prior, he fully revamped and energized editorial at the Bank Administration Institute (BAI), the nation’s largest banking non-profit. He assembled from scratch a team of one dozen contributors formerly from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters and other prominent outlets. As readership jumped 30 percent, Lou also created, hosted and engineered the BAI Banking Strategies podcast, piloting it to 120,000 listens and winning the company’s Bravo Award for his efforts. His current financial services podcast, “Bankadelic,” passed 1000 listens after just several months on the air.

In six years at U.S. News & World Report, Lou covered investment, writing about prominent public companies (Apple, Netflix, Berkshire Hathaway, more) and issues that included financial literacy and behavioral finance. Previously, he contributed to Reuters Money and Reuters Small Business, while serving as a columnist at the personal finance site Money Under 30. His multimedia credits include BBC Radio commentator (“Up All Night”) and appearances on several true-crime documentaries for the Discovery Channel’s Investigation Discovery network.

In 16 years at the Chicago Tribune, Lou was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his contributions to the “Killing Our Children” series and creator of two weekly syndicated columns, “On The Small Screen” (DVD reviews) and “The Recession Diaries” (personal finance). He was also one of the first reporters to cover the deadly Chicago Heat Wave of 1995; a fictionalized version of Lou (“Stu”) appeared in the Pegasus Players stage production “Heatwave.”

As a managing editor at AOL, he created the “Money College” blog site, powered by more than a dozen college-age freelancers he recruited and trained. “Money College” routinely garnered six-digit page views and Lou commissioned a five-part series on the exploding cost of tuitions, one of the first in the 2000s to take an in-depth look at the issue.

Lou’s work has also appeared in Forbes, the Los Angeles Times, Yahoo Finance, MSN, the Christian Science Monitor and news outlets across the world. His journalism honors include a shared Polk Award, a Chicago Tribune Innovator Award, the Bob Briner Impact Award, and Top 10 Business Blog of the Decade from Ambition.com (for a piece on laughter and sales). A journalism textbook author, Lou has seen his mentees land at the New York Times (White House correspondent), Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (arts critic) and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business (magazine editor in chief). As an adjunct professor at Loyola University Chicago, he led an eight-year rebuild of the Loyola Phoenix, culminating in an award for Best College Weekly Newspaper in the Nation from the Society of Professional Journalists.

As Qwoted’s first Editor in Chief, Lou oversees the standards committee, leads community-building efforts within journalism education, and acts as a resource and guide to writers. In his spare time, he is an accomplished audio engineer and studio musician, songwriter and composer for film. He recently finished an album of songs, “By Me & William Shakespeare,” with all lyrics borrowed from The Bard.

Lou holds a B.A. in English (high honors) from Rutgers College and an M.S. in Communication from National Louis University. He lives in Chicago with his wife Amy, a hospital chaplain, a bouncy corgi addicted to Cheez-Its, and two teenagers who know everything.

Reach out to Lou via LinkedIn or email lou@qwoted.com