Yukari Iwatani Kane is a veteran journalist with nearly fifteen years of experience writing about the technology industry. As a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, she covered Apple during the last years of Steve Jobs's reign.
Kane is best known for her in-depth analysis and scoops, among which include the news about Steve Jobs’s liver transplant, the iPad and the Verizon iPhone. Her stories have included the off-beat and hilarious like a piece on a fifteen-year old iPhone hacker and a story on iPad couture that became the subject of a Stephen Colbert rant. In 2011, she was named as a Gerald Loeb Award finalist as part of a WSJ team for a series on Internet privacy.
Among her peers, she developed a reputation as the recipient of controlled leaks from Apple, even becoming the subject of a segment on NPR’s On the Media. The truth is considerably less interesting. All of her scoops and stories came from painstaking reporting and vetting.
Prior to that, Kane was a correspondent in Tokyo, covering the Japanese technology industry, including Sony and Nintendo for the Wall Street Journal. Her page one profile in 2007 on Sony CEO Howard Stringer’s struggles in dealing with differing Western and Japanese cultural expectations is still seen as one of the most definitive and insightful pieces about him.
She has frequently appeared on both the Journal’s radio and video programs and on other national broadcasts. She has experience in public speaking and has participated on panels and on-stage interviews about subjects such as technology, media and Japan in both English and Japanese.
Kane started her career at U.S. News and World Report and Reuters. She is a graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and lives in San Francisco, where she works out of the Writers' Grotto. When she is not working, she and her husband are constantly on the hunt for good food and drink even if they have to travel for it.