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Maria Trombly

Newly appointed FBTW managing director Maria Trombly

Maria Trombly was born Maria Viktorovna Korolyova in Leningrad, USSR and moved to the United states with her family in 1978 when she was a very small child. In the US, her name became Maria Victoria Korolov.

She graduated from Cornell University with a degree in mathematics in 1990. While still a student, she worked for the Cornell Daily Sun and the Ithaca Times. A cover story for the latter about town-gown relations won an honorable mention from the New York Press Association for best feature story of the year.

After graduation, she went on to cover the Lake County suburbs for the Chicago Tribune. A story on corporal punishment in the schools made the front page of the paper. Another, on the growing drug trade in Lake County, made page 3.

A year later, she went to Moscow, where she was a freelance war correspondent for UPI for several months before being hired as a reporter by the Moscow Tribune. Within two months, she was promoted to national editor.

Using her contacts with local journalists around the former Soviet Union, she put together a team of correspondents throughout the republics. A year later, she moved to Reuters to be able to spend more time in the field covering civil wars.

Her work took her to Chechnya, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia before family concerns sent her back to the U.S., where she has been living since 1994.

She moved on to covering another type of revolution: the way the Internet is changing the way the world works. As a financial services writer for Computerworld, she was in the middle of the biggest change our economy has ever experienced.

Today, she is a technology columnist for the Securities Industry News and writes for other financial services publications, as well as Quill and the Online Journalism Review.

She is also active in the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2003, she received the society's President's Award for her work sa the chair of the SPJ's International Journalism Committee. She is also president of the New England Pro chapter of the SPJ. She took over when the chapter was functionally dead and made it one of the most active chapters in the organization.

Within the next two years, she plans to go back to foreign reporting. Her dream is to be the bureau chief in a small country that no one's ever heard of.