When Italian journalist and media strategist Martina Di Licosa landed a spot behind the scenes at Saturday Night Live at just 21, it felt like a full-circle moment.
“SNL was all I watched coming home from high school back in Italy,” she recalls. “I didn’t know a show could have that strong of a cultural impact.” Still, she never dared to dream of working there herself. “It was all for entertainment.”
But three years later, while finishing her degree at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, one of the top film programs in the world, she received an email she was sure had to be a prank. “I didn’t jump or scream or anything,” she says, laughing. “I was completely stunned.”
It was SNL. And they wanted to talk.
As a member of the script department during the show’s 48th season, Di Licosa spent her days reading, refining, and strategizing. “Each episode airs maybe ten sketches, but over forty are written every week,” she explains. She obsessed over punctuation (“Every exclamation mark mattered”) and paid close attention to the audience during both dress rehearsals and live shows, taking mental notes on what landed and what fell flat.
“A lot of it was unpredictable,” she admits. “Sometimes I’d be crying laughing reading a sketch, and then it just didn’t hit the way I thought it would.”
Her favorite episode? The pre-Christmas special co-hosted by Steve Martin and Martin Short. “I’ve watched Father of the Bride exactly twelve times,” she says. “Seeing their chemistry come alive in person was surreal.” That experience taught her something lasting: “Whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, I now think of characters as pairs, as people who feed off each other. Everyone has that one person who shapes how they talk and even how they think.”
By spring, rumblings of a writers’ strike were growing louder, and SNL ultimately canceled its final episodes of the season. The uncertainty was hard to ignore. “I couldn’t overlook how unpredictable the industry was becoming,” she says. Plus, the show’s focus on current events had been slowly but surely attracting her to an adjacent field: journalism.
That’s when she got another life-changing email, this time from Ivy League institution Columbia University, home of the Pulitzer Prize. They were offering her a scholarship to pursue a master’s degree. “I think a real writer keeps their voice intact no matter the field,” she says. “If you can write about real people and events and make it as compelling as fiction, that’s storytelling.”
Before she even crossed the stage to collect her degree, Di Licosa was already interviewing major figures in tech and finance, from Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica to Sezzle CEO Charlie Youakim. “After a year surrounded by celebrities at SNL, high-stakes interviews didn’t faze me,” she says. “I know a lot of young journalists find those intimidating, but for me, it’s the easiest part.”
In May 2025, she was awarded the Peter Keller Prize – and a cash award – from the family of the late Wall Street Journal editor, recognizing her exceptional editorial skill. Soon after, she was recruited by Forbes, the global benchmark for business journalism.
“Forbes is the gold standard for what I wanted to do, telling engaging stories about business that people want to read, stories that lead the conversation around money and success.”
Her first cover story, a detailed report on the financial impact of Jeff Bezos’ Italian wedding, came just two weeks into the job. The video version of the piece drew over half a million views on social media. “What made that story stand out,” she says, “was that while it had a real business angle – people wanted to know how it would affect Venice’s local economy – it was also fun. Achieving both in one piece is what I’m proudest of.”
Now a core member of the Forbes newsroom, with seven cover stories and counting, Di Licosa continues to bring a touch of entertainment flair to her reporting.
“When my investigation into Travis Kelce’s net worth got picked up by outlets like Cosmopolitan and Business Insider, that’s when it clicked,” she says. That piece alone attracted over 120,000 readers to her personal portfolio, according to Forbes’s public data.
“I may not be at SNL anymore, and journalism comes with its own standards,” says Di Licosa, “But at the end of the day, people read Forbes because they want to feel inspired – and that should be fun.”
