Julie Mollins is a web journalist working for the Centre for International Forestry Research in Indonesia.

Previously, she spent eight years working for Reuters.com and the Thomson Reuters Foundation websites AlertNet and TrustLaw.

She has played a leading role developing editorial communities and social networks, while also reporting, writing, editing, conducting audio interviews, making videos, and taking pictures. She has worked with a range of web content management systems and trained journalists in online production and social media use.

At Thomson Reuters in London, she has had a hand in producing, planning and overseeing online editorial news coverage on a broad spectrum of political, economic, humanitarian and tech-related news events ranging from the UK general election in 2010 on Reuters.com, to the UK budgets in 2009 and 2010, the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day in 2011 on TrustLaw and Reuters.com, LeWeb 2011 in Paris for AlertNet and Reuters, and the global World-Bank sponsored Sanitation Hackathon in 2012 on AlertNet.

She has also produced live symposiums at Thomson Reuters London headquarters, including co-coordinating Africa Gathering 2012 for tech start-ups and entrepreneurs, and Brave New Networked Worlds 2011 in collaboration with the World Food Programme. She has participated in panel symposiums in London and Berlin.

As well, she has covered such subjects as technology, development, poverty, women’s rights, health, water, international security issues and the arts from London and Toronto and while on assignments in New York, Chicago, Oxford, Stockholm, Paris and Istanbul.

AlertNet is a humanitarian news service covering wars, conflict, natural disasters, climate change, food and health emergencies. TrustLaw covers good governance and women’s rights news.

Not only does she have experience editing and delivering copy to the Internet quickly and to the high standards set by the Reuters style guide, but she can take a leadership role, guiding others to promote stories, blogs, pictures and video that create effective and compelling news sites.

Her experience working for the Reuters.com UK website in London and Toronto has given her the capacity to coordinate online operations with an internal, local team, and also with correspondents in editorial centres around the world — working with lightning speed when news breaks.

A dual British-Canadian citizen, she started her journalism career in Canada where she worked freelance and on contract as a researcher-reporter for a range of news publications including Maclean’s, Canadian Business, MoneySense and the Edmonton Journal. She did her first beat reporting at the University of Toronto (UofT) Varsity student newspaper where she covered architectural developments on campus.

She has also had stories published in the former art magazine Lola and former literary magazines Saturday Night and Small Spiral Notebook.

Before becoming a journalist in 2000, she worked as a prop builder and jeweller at some of Canada’s most renowned theatre companies, including the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, Canadian Stage and the National Ballet of Canada in Toronto.

She worked for six years part-time as a researcher-writer at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at Hart House, UofT, writing press releases and creating a database for a 600-piece major Canadian art collection, known for the role it has played in promoting the works of the country’s most famous artists, including the Group of Seven.

Her educational qualifications include a Bachelor of Arts — with a specialization in cinema studies — from UofT’s Innis College, and a Bachelor of Journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, where she served as photo editor for the Ryersonian newspaper.

She attended art college part time at the Corcoran School of Art (now the Corcoran College of Art) in Washington, D.C., where she also graduated from high school, a process she began in Ottawa. After Washington, she moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she briefly attended the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design before moving on to begin liberal arts studies at Dalhousie University.

Her first-hand experience of the arts has given her an inside edge when writing stories about art exhibitions, architecture, personalities and trends for the Reuters lifestyle wire.

She also writes for Where Women Work and Africa Gathering.