Lori Matsukawa — Being There: Memoir of an Asian American Journalist
Award-winning former KING TV anchor Lori Matsukawa reflects on 36 years in Seattle broadcast journalism, breaking barriers as a woman of color in Northwest media.
Why we picked this
Matsukawa spent 36 years at KING TV shaping how Seattle saw itself — her memoir is both a local history of Northwest broadcast journalism and an account of what it cost to integrate it.
Lori Matsukawa anchored at KING TV in Seattle for 36 years, becoming one of the most recognized faces in Northwest broadcast journalism and, along the way, co-founding both the Seattle Chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association and the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Washington. Her memoir Being There arrives in April 2026 and covers the full arc of a career that began when a woman of color from a working-class family with a public school education was expected to go nowhere near a camera.
The book traces her path from a multi-racial upbringing in Hawaiʻi and a year as Miss Teenage America through the specific indignities and breakthroughs of a career in a medium that was in the process of figuring out — slowly, unevenly — what representation actually required. Matsukawa writes with the directness of someone who spent decades choosing her words for broadcast: the memoir is concrete where others might be vague, and specific about the discrimination she encountered rather than euphemistic about it.
For Seattle audiences, this is also a chance to hear the untold story of a figure who was present for so much of the city’s recent history. The event at Town Hall’s Wyncote NW Forum is in-person only.