[5] In 1981, with colleagues Bill Sing and David Kishiyama (also then from The Los Angeles Times), Frank Kwan and Tritia Toyota (then of KNBC-TV News), and Dwight Chuman (from Rafu Shimpo, a local Japanese-American newspaper), she co-founded the Asian-American Journalists Association (AAJA), an organization that has grown to represent Asian Americans and Pacific Islander (AAPI) people more broadly.
By 2021, when the 2021 marked its fortieth anniversary, the organization reported having 1,600 members across the United States and Asia, with almost a third of these students, some of whom participate in internship programs that try to increase AAPI representation in the journalistic profession.
Yoshihara reported on a wide variety of issues during her years with The Los Angeles Times, including topics related to Asian-Americans.
In 1997, for example, she discussed the 1992 Los Angeles riots with reference to the experiences of inner city Korean-American merchants whose stores became targets for violence but who found many police unresponsive.
[9] In this interview she described the Asian-American experience in 1997 as a "political rollercoaster" following the election of the first Asian American as a governor: this was Chinese-American Gary Locke in Washington state.
Starting new online news sources was easy, they argued; maintaining and growing them, and keeping them financially solvent, was hard.