Aurore Lester-Smith is British by birth and has worked in journalism since 1981. For ten years, before the fall of communism, she covered East-West issues, the European Union and NATO for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Next she worked at Reuters and in 1995 went on to found the news agency, Financial Europe Email, the first electronic EU affairs service available exclusively via the Internet.

Accredited to the European Union institutions, a member of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ, UK) and the International Press Association (API-IPA, Brussels), Aurore studied languages at the Institute of Linguists (UK). She is bi-lingual in French and English and is a Schuman scholar.