How Keith Kelly Went From Media Reporter to Local (News) Legend

For more than two decades, Keith Kelly was the feared-and-revered media reporter of The New York Post. Now, at 71, he’s three years into a decidedly different gig: editing a group of scrappy, hyperlocal Big Apple weeklies owned by Straus Media, including West Side Spirit, Chelsea News and Our Town Downtown. “It is not as different or as difficult as one might think,” he says of the transition. “I knew who the good guys and the bad guys were, where the figurative bodies were buried. Now I’m covering the neighborhoods of Manhattan the same way.”

Kelly, who got his start a half-century ago at a weekly (“I’m right back where I started”), likes that his titles still make their money the old-fashioned way — from advertisements in print. That means he operates at a remove from today’s internet-oriented deadline pressure. “We’re not under the gun that way,” he explains. Still, he says, “we break stories,” many of which are sparked by the most basic journalistic principle: “You walk around and go, ‘Hey, what’s going on here! Why’s this screwed up? Let’s report that out.’ ”

Assignment editors, take note: Kelly, who cycles to his office, believes the most under-reported topic in Manhattan is the lawlessness of the city’s bike lanes. “It’s chaos,” he declares. “No enforcement. A lot of accidents. They’ve become these speedways for deliveries.”

As for his journalistic alma mater, “I’m still friends with everybody over there. We go out to Mets games.” Still, he doesn’t miss it. “Once digital took over, the Post became more right-wing.” He observes that The California Post, which Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch launched in January (see page 11), is foremost an ideological play. “Their theory was that a lot of the left’s Democratic political leadership was coming out of California. They want to remind everybody that California has problems and undermine those potential [national] Democratic candidates.”

Kelly contends that the Post “never bothered me on my media beat” with its conservative proclivities. In fact, one of his favorite scoops — exposing how Tucker Carlson’s partisan The Daily Caller pursued a baseless plagiarism allegation against The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer in the aftermath of her reporting on the billionaire right-wing activist Koch brothers — “was not the kind of story you’d expect the Post to run, which is why I was so proud of it.”

This story appeared in the May 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.