Marion Strecker

Marion Strecker (b. São Paulo, October 17, 1960) is a Brazilian journalist, photographer and businessperson. She is known as one of the pioneers of the Internet industry in South America. Since 2011 she has been living in San Francisco, California, and working as an Editor-at-Large for UOL. UOL is the major content portal in Brazil. Since 2010, she has also been a columnist for Folha de S.Paulo, the largest newspaper in Brazil. She writes in the Market section about technology, innovation and behavior.

Strecker is one of the founders of UOL. She was the Content VP of the company from 1996 until 2011. UOL soon became a very large website. It reached about 70% of the online audience in Brazil with news, entertainment and services.

Before joining the team that founded UOL, Marion Strecker worked at Folha de S.Paulo from 1984 to 1996. She was a writer, an art critic, editor of the cultural section, planning coordinator, reporter, director of the archives and director of the Folha News Agency. Strecker was one of the authors of the “Folha Newsroom Manual”.

After coordinating the Digitization of the Newspaper Archives Project in the early 90s, Strecker led a team that created many high tech products. These included like audiotext services (1993), the newspaper’s full text yearly CD-ROMs (1994-96) and a system similar to a BBS. This system gave all the Folha de S.Paulo journalists and foreign correspondents access to the archives online, using telephone lines and microcomputers. Because of this work, Strecker was given the Folha Award on Journalism, Special Category, in 1995.

She also led the team which created the first website for Folha’s Media Group in Brazil. It was first used on 9 July 1995. Later that year, Strecker created the first content team for the launch of UOL in April 1996. UOL soon became the leader in the Brazilian internet market.

Since the 80s, she has written for several magazines and also spoken at many seminars and conferences in Brazil, United States and Europe. In the 90s she had a short career as a Professor of New Technologies for Communication at Casper Libero College of Journalism in São Paulo.

Early in her career as a journalist, Strecker was a writer and a co-editor with Lisette Lagnado of “Arte em São Paulo”. This is a magazine founded by the Brazilian painter Luiz Paulo Baravelli, about the visual arts.

Strecker holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Social Communication from PUC (Pontific Catholic University of São Paulo). Before working in journalism and online media, Strecker was a music teacher and a performer.

Strecker is married to the Brazilian journalist Mario Cesar Carvalho. They have two children, Theo and Helena.

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