Maria Korolov Follow

Maria Korolov covers artificial intelligence and cybersecurity for national technology magazines and edits a blog about virtual reality. See the full list of publications she writes for here.

Follow her on Twitter at @MariaKorolov, on Threads at @MariaKorolov, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel.

Maria Korolov majored in mathematics but after graduation decided to follow her true calling, writing. She started out covering local politics for the Chicago Tribune then became a war correspondent, reporting from Chechnya, Afghanistan, and other war zones in and around the former Soviet Union in the 1990s and ran a news bureau in Shanghai in the 2000s. Since 2009, she’s been living in Massachusetts and covering artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and extended reality for national technology publications. She also regularly speaks at industry events and virtual conferences and webinars.

She won the 2020 National Gold Award from the American Society of Business Publication Editors for her article Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling — the top honor in enterprise technology journalism. Most recently, her CSO article, How AI chatbot ChatGPT changes the phishing game, was a regional finalist in the Technology & Innovation Reporting category of the 2024 Azbee Awards of Excellence.

Follow her technology coverage on her website, MariaKorolov.com, or on Twitter at Twitter.com/MariaKorolov. Email her at [email protected].

Detailed background
Maria Korolov 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.

1994 -- Russia - IDsA year later, she moved 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 Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, 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. In 2004, she went back overseas and ran a business and technology news bureau in Shanghai for five years for SourceMedia, formerly part of Thomson Reuters.

After returning to the United States after the Asian financial crisis, she began covering cybersecurity, and then moved on to artificial intelligence. Since 2022, she’s been focusing on generative AI and its implications for enterprises.

Maria Korolov has been 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. Korolov also served as treasurer of the New England chapter of the National Writers Union. In Shanghai, she was president of the Shanghai Entrepreneur Group, and active in the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club. In 2014, she founded Women in Virtual Reality.

She is the author of the SPJ’s Journalist’s Guide to the Geneva Conventions. She is a co-author and editor of the book A Changing China, and editor of Warren Liu’s book China Key Success Factors.

She speaks at conferences and has been quoted in national media as an expert on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, business in China, and international journalism.

And she also writes science fiction with a positive and light-hearted view of the future.

During the height of the Covid pandemic, she and a group of fellow speculative fiction writers founded MetaStellar, an online magazine of science fiction, fantasy, and horror which quickly grew to one of the most popular online sci-fi magazines. As the magazine’s editor-in-chief, she hosts a weekly YouTube segment and manages a team of over a dozen volunteer editors. Since its launch, MetaStellar has published more than a thousand short stories and articles, over 270 videos, two short story anthologies, and is currently in the process of serializing a novel.