Nicole landed her first front page at age eight with a Father's Day poetry contest. (Each line in the epic ode rhymed with "Phil.") She later studied the newspaper trade at San Francisco State at a time when print and TV majors never met in the halls.
During a year abroad in Florence, Italy she learned the difference between
fusilli and
cavatappi as well as Masaccio and Masolino. After graduation, she returned to Florence where she organized travel segments for foreign TV crews, then coaxed large vans through streets designed to thwart medieval invaders.
The only foreigner at the University of Florence's Media and Communications masters program, after graduation Nicole landed a job at leading national private network Canale 5 in Milan. She spent three years as Foreign News Coordinator for a daily 6 p.m. news and entertainment program called "
Verissimo," producing up to five stories a week.
In 1999, tired of reading heatstroke-induced "Under the Tuscan Sun" travel narratives, she launched English-language news website
zoomata. Stories ranging from a grape-stomping workshop to the first association of house husbands caught the attention of Newsweek, where she wrote about science and tech as well as design and fashion.
She has also worked for the Economist.com,
Wired News, the
New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal Europe, BBC2, Discovery Channel and Italian-language editions of Linux Magazine, Wired and Vanity Fair. While visiting the world's only
plant intelligence lab and voting in the first
online Democratic primary she also picked up video, photo and web skills.
As an editor, she reshapes content into English for trade publications
Fashion Magazine, photography magazine
Variatio and architecture magazine
Elementi. As managing editor at video encyclopedia Ovo, she led a team of outside copy editors and translators, shored up scripts and visual content while creating a house style guide, fact-checking manual and instituting an unheard of Milan office tradition -- Friday donuts.
She also blogs daily about all things Cupertino at
Cult of Mac, does not usually refer to herself in the third person and dreams of a guest spot on
Myth Busters.
You can connect with her on
Facebook,
Linked in Twitter and
Flickr.
Contact: email nm AT nicolemartinelli.com or the
contact form at her web site zoomata.