Wanda Lloyd is a public speaker and author of the memoir Coming Full Circle: From Jim Crow to Journalism, published by NewSouth Books. The memoir shares Lloyd’s groundbreaking experience growing up under the restrictive laws that separated races, yet she became one of the highest-ranking women and people of color working in daily newspaper journalism. In 2019 she was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame.

​

Lloyd has worked as an editor at seven daily newspapers, including The Washington Post and USA Today. She retired from daily journalism in 2013 as executive editor of the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, a Gannett newspaper. After her newsroom career of more than four decades, Lloyd was appointed as associate professor and chair of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications at Savannah State University in Savannah, Georgia, a position she held for three years before returning to retirement.

​

As executive editor in Montgomery, Lloyd was responsible for news content and editorial direction for the daily and weekly newspapers, she launched and served as executive editor of three magazines and she oversaw several website redesigns and the emerging strategy for social media.

           

As department chair at Savannah State, Lloyd launched SSU Media High, a residential digital media summer program for high school students, and she expanded the Southern Regional Press Institute (SRPI) to include an annual national job fair. Because of her contributions and relationship with the Press Institute for more than 50 years, in 2019 Lloyd was inducted into the SRPI Hall of Fame.

           

Lloyd was the founding executive director of the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. The Diversity Institute trained people of color seeking mid-career shifts into daily newspaper journalism careers. In Nashville, she was also co-host of “Behind the Headlines,” a weekly radio news analysis show on WFSK-FM, the Fisk University station.

           

In previous Gannett experience, Lloyd was senior editor at USA Today, and managing editor at the Greenville (S.C.) News. She has also worked as an editor at The Washington Post, the Evening Bulletin in Providence, RI, the Miami Herald and the Atlanta Journal.
           

Lloyd has been a four-time juror for the Pulitzer Prize. She is co-editor of The Edge of Change: Women in the 21st Century Press, published by University of Chicago Press in 2009. She served on the faculty of the Summer Program for Minority Journalists at Columbia University.

​           

As a long-time member of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), she directed that organization’s landmark study Muted Voices: Frustration and Fear in the Newsroom, a survey of black journalists and newsroom managers that first documented the chasm between black journalists and their mostly white editors and news directors. In 2019 Lloyd was inducted into the NABJ Hall of Fame.  She currently serves as a member of the Accrediting Committee of the Accrediting Council on Education for Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC), and she serves on the Executive Council of AARP Georgia.

​           

Lloyd has served on journalism advisory boards at Alabama State, Savannah State, Auburn and Virginia Commonwealth universities and she was a member of the board of directors of the Alabama Associated Press Media Editors and the Alabama Press Association. 

As a former director of the American Society of News Editors (ASNE), Lloyd chaired committees on Diversity, Floor Managers, and Personnel, and she was co-editor of the ASNE Bulletin, the organization’s monthly magazine. She also served as a member of the advisory board of the Dow Jones News Fund.

           

Lloyd was a 2014 fellow of the Scripps Howard Academic Leadership Academy at Louisiana State University's Manship School of Communications. Her honors include the Ida B. Wells and Robert G. McGruder awards – both for media diversity; Career Achievement Award from Columbia University; Distinguished Alumna of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO), and the Washington, DC, Spelman Alumna of the Year. 

           

Lloyd is an alumna with a degree in English from Spelman College, on whose Board of Trustees she served for almost two decades. She established the endowed Wanda Lloyd Scholarship at Spelman to help support students with a demonstrated interest in journalism. In 2016 Spelman awarded Lloyd the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.

           

Lloyd is a Diamond Life member of the Savannah Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta, Inc., and she was a charter member of the Eta Kappa Chapter (citywide undergraduate, later affiliated with Spelman) of Delta Sigma Theta. She is also a member of the Savannah (GA) Chapter of The Links, Incorporated.