Dina Kyriakidou Contini, the West Coast bureau chief for Reuters, sent out the following staff hiring announcement on Monday:
I am delighted to announce that Mari Saito joins the San Francisco team as Technology Correspondent in charge of e-commerce. A technology, markets and energy correspondent in Tokyo, Mari was a key member of the team that won the Reuters Story of the Year Award in 2013 for its coverage of the Fukushima cleanup. Apart from shedding light on yakuza brokers sending homeless men to the nuclear plant, Mari brings a long record of exclusives and enterprise on a wide range of stories, from the 2011 tsunami to companies such as Sony and SoftBank. Mari graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia in 2010 and worked as a production assistant for Reuters Insider in Washington D.C. before moving to Tokyo. A Japanese native, Mari spent most of her teen years herding sheep and surfing in New Zealand. She will relocate to California in May.
I am also happy to welcome Julia Love to the Reuters family as our Apple correspondent. Julia has covered the world’s biggest company for the San Jose Mercury News, tackling the story in innovative ways, breaking news on Apple’s impact on the Bay Area and forcing the notoriously reticent company to talk to her. Before that, Julia worked as a federal courts reporter for the Recorder (American Lawyer Media), covering trials involving some of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies. A fluent Spanish speaker, Julia graduated from Duke University, magna cum laude. She comes from a family of journalists but did not let this deter her from joining the profession. She joins the bureau in early May.
Last but not least, Yasmeen Abutaleb joins the bureau as a technology reporter, covering companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. One of the most talented graduate trainees we’ve had in recent years, she has impressed editors with her reporting for the health/pharma, stocks and data teams, and especially her contribution to the Ebola story. She previously interned for Reuters in 2013 as a Kaiser Media Fellow covering the implementation of Obamacare. Yasmeen graduated from the University of Maryland in 2014 with dual degrees in microbiology and journalism, becoming one of the only people in her family not to become an engineer. Yasmeen says that if she wasn’t employed by Reuters, she would probably be working alongside her younger sister, who dons a 30-pound terrapin suit most weekends as the University of Maryland’s mascot. Yasmeen moves to San Francisco from New York in late May.
Please join me in welcoming these talented journalists to the bureau.
