{"id":1237,"date":"2026-05-08T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/2026\/05\/08\/how-keith-kelly-went-from-media-reporter-to-local-news-legend\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T17:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T17:00:00","slug":"how-keith-kelly-went-from-media-reporter-to-local-news-legend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/2026\/05\/08\/how-keith-kelly-went-from-media-reporter-to-local-news-legend\/","title":{"rendered":"How Keith Kelly Went From Media Reporter to Local (News) Legend"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\tFor more than two decades, Keith Kelly was the feared-and-revered media reporter of The New York Post.<\/em> Now, at 71, he\u2019s three years into a decidedly different gig: editing a group of scrappy, hyperlocal Big Apple weeklies owned by Straus Media, including West Side Spirit<\/em>, Chelsea News<\/em> and Our Town Downtown<\/em>. \u201cIt is not as different or as difficult as one might think,\u201d he says of the transition. \u201cI knew who the good guys and the bad guys were, where the figurative bodies were buried. Now I\u2019m covering the neighborhoods of Manhattan the same way.\u201d \t<\/p>\n

\tKelly, who got his start a half-century ago at a weekly (\u201cI\u2019m right back where I started\u201d), likes that his titles still make their money the old-fashioned way \u2014 from advertisements in print. That means he operates at a remove from today\u2019s internet-oriented deadline pressure. \u201cWe\u2019re not under the gun that way,\u201d he explains. Still, he says, \u201cwe break stories,\u201d many of which are sparked by the most basic journalistic principle: \u201cYou walk around and go, \u2018Hey, what\u2019s going on here! Why\u2019s this screwed up? Let\u2019s report that out.\u2019 \u201d <\/p>\n

\tAssignment editors, take note: Kelly, who cycles to his office, believes the most under-reported topic in Manhattan is the lawlessness of the city\u2019s bike lanes. \u201cIt\u2019s chaos,\u201d he declares. \u201cNo enforcement. A lot of accidents. They\u2019ve become these speedways for deliveries.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tAs for his journalistic alma mater, <\/em>\u201cI\u2019m still friends with everybody over there. We go out to Mets games.\u201d Still, he doesn\u2019t miss it. \u201cOnce digital took over, the Post<\/em> became more right-wing.\u201d He observes that The<\/em> California Post<\/em>, which Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch launched in January (see page 11), is foremost an ideological play. \u201cTheir theory was that a lot of the left\u2019s Democratic political leadership was coming out of California. They want to remind everybody that California has problems and undermine those potential [national] Democratic candidates.\u201d \t<\/p>\n

\tKelly contends that the Post<\/em> \u201cnever bothered me on my media beat\u201d with its conservative proclivities. In fact, one of his favorite scoops \u2014 exposing how Tucker Carlson\u2019s partisan The Daily Caller <\/em>pursued a baseless plagiarism allegation against The New Yorker<\/em>\u2018s Jane Mayer in the aftermath of her reporting on the billionaire right-wing activist Koch brothers \u2014 \u201cwas not the kind of story you\u2019d expect the Post<\/em> to run, which is why I was so proud of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tThis story appeared in the May 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For more than two decades, Keith Kelly was the feared-and-revered media reporter of The New York Post. Now, at 71, he\u2019s 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. \u201cIt is not as different or as difficult as one might think,\u201d he says of the transition. \u201cI knew who the good guys and the bad guys were, where the figurative bodies were buried. Now I\u2019m covering the neighborhoods of Manhattan the same way.\u201d Kelly, who got his start a half-century ago at a weekly (\u201cI\u2019m right back where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1238,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[94,95,2,783,784],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-business-news","category-hollywood","category-new-york-power","category-ny-power"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}