bio

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A San Francisco native, 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.

She spent a year abroad in Florence, Italy learning to tell the difference between fusilli and cavatappi and Masaccio from Masolino. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in print journalism, she returned to Florence, helping foreign TV crews by pre-producing travel segments and then negotiating streets designed to thwart medieval invaders with large vans.

The only foreigner at the University of Florence’s Media and Communications masters program, Nicole went native after graduation moving to Milan to work for Italy’s leading national private network, Canale 5. She spent three years as Foreign News Coordinator for daily 6 p.m. news and entertainment program “Verissimo,” producing up to five stories a week.

In 1999, tired of reading stories in the foreign press about stray cats in the Coliseum and heatstroke-induced under-the-Tuscan-sun travel narratives, she launched website zoomata. Stories ranging from a grape-stomping workshop to the first association of house husbands caught the attention of Newsweek, where she started writing about science and tech as well as design and fashion.

She went on to work 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.

Nicole has been inside the world’s only plant intelligence lab, voted online in the online Democratic primary and covered a host of tech and science-related fields picking up video, photo and web skills in the process.

She has also worked as an editor, reshaping content from various languages into English for, among others, fashion trade publication Sportswear International and photography magazine Variatio. As managing editor at video encyclopedia Ovo, she shored up scripts and visual content as well as creating the house style guide and fact-checking manual.

She 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 info AT nicolemartinelli.com or the contact form at her web site zoomata.