For more than two decades, Keith Kelly has been the feared and revered media reporter for New York Post. Now, at 71, he has spent three years in a very different job: editing a group of annoying, hyperlocal Big Apple weekly magazines owned by Straus Media, including Spirit of the West Side, Chelsea news and Our city is downtown. “It’s not as different or as difficult as one might think,” he says of the transition. “I knew who the good guys and bad guys were, and where the symbolic bodies were buried. Now I cover the neighborhoods of Manhattan the same way.”
Kelly, who got his start a half-century ago at a weekly magazine (“I’m back where I started”), likes that his titles still make their money the old-fashioned way — from print advertising. This means that it works far from the deadline pressure oriented around today’s Internet. “We’re not under the gun that way,” he explains. Still, he says, “We publish stories,” and many of them proceed from a basic journalistic principle: “You walk around and say, ‘Hey, what’s going on here! Why is this a failure? Let’s spread that.”
Assignment editors, take note: Kelly, who bikes to his office, believes an under-covered topic in Manhattan is the chaos in the city’s bike lanes. “It’s chaos,” he declares. “There is no enforcement. There are too many accidents. These have become highways for deliveries.”
As for his journalism university, “I’m still friends with everyone there. We go out to Mets games.” However, he doesn’t miss it. “Once digital technology took over, it became mail I have become more right-wing,” he notes the California Post“, launched by Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch in January (see page 11), is primarily an ideological play. “Their theory was that much of the Democratic political leadership of the left was coming from California. “They want to remind everyone that California has problems and undermine that potential.” [national] Democratic candidates.
Kelly confirms that mail “My media style never bothered me” with its conservative leanings. In fact, one of his favorite scoops was revealing how biased Tucker Carlson was Daily Caller Pursuing an unfounded allegation of plagiarism The New YorkerJane Mayer on the heels of her report on billionaire right-wing activist Koch Brothers – ‘It wasn’t the kind of story you’d expect mail To run, which is why I was so proud of him.
This story appeared in the May 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
