Julie Makinen is executive editor of The Desert Sun and State Editor - California. Before joining The Desert Sun, she was a reporter, editor and foreign correspondent for publications including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the International New York Times. She has served as a journalism trainer with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in Afghanistan and on the board of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China. She was a JSK Journalism Fellow at Stanford 2016-17, and later was on staff at the Stanford Graduate School of Business' Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.