Julie Beun-Chown

Julie has gone to some unlikely place in search of a good story—Samoa, Guam, Micronesia, Tonga, Australia, New Zealand, the United States and, of course, Canada.

She has written about Australian murders for People magazine, Canadian breakthroughs in health research for Australian health titles, the hidden tragedy of child abuse in Tonga for Indian newspapers and opined on every aspect of her life and her family for the Motherlode column in Canadian Living magazine.

Recently, she investigated the health benefits of silence in an increasingly raucous world, Web 2.0 social networking, orthomolecular medicine and the greening of IT companies for Canwest News Service.

The World Awaits

After graduating from Carleton University in Ottawa, Julie moved her act to Europe then Australia, first working for the award-winning Fairfax Newspapers Group and moonlighting as Australian correspondent for the International Women's Feature Service before moving into glossy magazines.

Magazines

After a two year stint at a trashy-but-fabulous women's magazine published by Australian Consolidated Press in Sydney, she landed her dream job as writer for Who Weekly, the Australian edition of Time Inc's People magazine. There, she covered everything from serial murders and political manoeuvring to celebrity high jinx and up-to-the-minute current affairs. Later, she became the health editor at the now defunct Australian Family Circle. She is currently a freelancer writing for Canadian Living, GoodHealth and Medicine (Australia), Homemakers/Madame, CanWest News Service (Ottawa Citizen, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette etc), CalTech's radio science show, and the Canadian Cancer Society.

Random Facts

As a cub reporter at Carleton University's student newspaper, The Charlatan, Julie's first interviews were with Canadian post punk rock pioneers, the Grapes of Wrath, Skinny Puppy and 54-40. She was accompanied by her then-boyfriend, Pilot Peppler, founder of PilotWare, a media asset management system used by all the major American reality TV, game and talk shows.

Julie spent 12 years traveling around Australia and the South Pacific, writing about everything from Samoa's traditional female chiefs to the exploding youth suicide rate in Western Australia.

She has interviewed countless thinkers and doers, from Canadian writing legend Mordecai Richler and French actor Gerard Depardieu to the soccer god Pele and gorilla activist Jane Goodall.

She once spent several hours on a luxury cruiser in Sydney Harbour being seasick with "The Nanny" actress, Fran Drescher. They decided to conduct the interview anyway, lying on cabin bunks and sipping diet soda.

Julie was part of the reporting team that spent one memorable Friday morning breaking the news of Michael Jackson's marriage to Debbie Rowe in Australia. Minutes before her deadline, her computer crashed and ate the story. She wrote it again from memory—in less than 20 minutes.

One of her early newspaper assignments saw her clambering down an Indonesian container ship onto a tiny pilot boat—during a storm in the Tasman Sea.

Julie speaks English, French and a garbled version of Spanglish.