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Lori Matsukawa (born 1956) is an American television news journalist who spent thirty-six years as evening news anchor at KING 5, the NBC News affiliate in Seattle. She has won two Emmys and numerous honors from regional and national organizations for her broadcasts, which have covered everything from the imprisonment of Japanese Americans in World War II to the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City and Vancouver. She has been honored for her contributions to diversity in U.S. news media by the Asian American Journalists Association and was named Communicator of the Year by the Association for Women in Communications. In 2019, The Seattle Times newspaper featured her retirement on its front page.
While at KRCR, she met and married Larry Blackstock, a news director. They have a son, Alex.
Matsukawa co-founded the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Washington in 2003. She also helped start the Northwest Journalists of Color Scholarship, which has funded the journalism studies of students since 1986.
Her last broadcast was June 14, 2019. She called "Prisoners in Their Own Land", a 2017 series about Japanese American internment, aired on the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066 during World War II, "the exclamation point" on her career. The series won her a Northwest Regional Emmy Award, her first.
In addition to her Northwest Regional Emmy Award for "Prisoners in Their Own Land," Matsukawa won a second Emmy for "Shane Sato: Portraits of Courage," a 2018 story about a photographer who chronicled Seattle Nisei veterans. She is a 2014 Silver Circle inductee by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences's Northwest Chapter and a 2005 hall of fame inductee of the University of Washington's communications department, from which she received a master's degree in 1996. That year the Northwest Asian Weekly Foundation named her an Asian-American Living Pioneer. She is also a recipient of the 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award by the Asian American Journalists Association, whose Seattle chapter she co-founded in 1985.
In 2009, she was named Communicator of the Year by the Association for Women in Communications.
In 2022, Matsukawa received Japan's Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays, for promotion of friendly relations between Japan and the United States.
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