Biography

Maria Trombly is founder and president of Trombly Ltd., an editorial process ousourcing company.

Clients include Securities Industry News, CardLine Global, Waters, Reed Elsevier's PharmAsia News, and dozens of other publications.

She has been based in Shanghai, China since March of 2004.

She 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. She spent a month in the trenches with Abzhazian separatists, followed the Georgian guard as they looted and pillaged their way through Western Georgia during the civil war with the Zviadists, and was twice taken prisoner.

Family concerns sent her back to the U.S. in 1994, where 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.

Maria Trombly is active in the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2003, she received the society's President's Award for her work as the chair of the SPJ's International Journalism Committee. She is also past 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. As a result of her work, the chapter received an award for Outstanding Small Chapter in its region in 2004. Trombly also served as treasurer of the New England chapter of the National Writers Union, and was a board member of the Boston-based Society of Documentation Professionals.