Julie Makinen

Julie Makinen is a newspaper editor and publishing executive. Ms. Makinen is chairperson of the California News Publishers Association and a board member of the Coachella Valley Journalism Foundation. Previously she served as editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Standard and as executive editor of the Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California. She was Beijing Bureau Chief for the Los Angeles Times and served on the board of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China.

As a trainer for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Ms. Makinen helped launch the Pajhwok Afghan News agency in Kabul. She has been a fellow with the Japan Center for International Exchange and the Foreign Press Center of Japan, and co-authored a Los Angeles-focused travel app, DTLA Explorer. Ms. Makinen was a 2016-17 Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. She received her bachelor’s degree in Human Biology from Stanford and her master’s degree in East Asian Studies from UCLA.