Rochelle attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she majored in journalism and English.
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.
[5] 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.
[6][7][8] 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.