Committed to truth-telling
Kenzie O’Keefe left her high-paying job at a marketing consulting agency to become editor/publisher of North News. Why? To seek the truth.
by CALLIE SCHMIDT | Web Editor
From being an on-call shelter advocate and crisis line volunteer in Boulder to being the editor and publisher of North News in north Minneapolis, Kenzie O’Keefe has done many jobs. But the underlying common denominator is connecting with people and telling the truth.
Can you tell me about your journey to your job as editor of North News?
“I first got into journalism in high school. I was the sports editor and the index editor of my school paper. I did that for two years, and I went to St. Paul Academy. I went to college at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. There I started out as a photographer and then become photo editor, and then actually became the editor-in-chief of that paper. So I was involved with my school paper, which was a biweekly all four years of college. Then I graduated college and ended up going to work in the marketing industry for a while, but I still occasionally did some freelance writing and journalistic work for an online magazine called MEL.
“I worked at a marketing consulting agency that served Fortune 500 clients. I also had a job between leaving that agency and working at the newspaper. I worked for the nonprofit The Brandlab as a high school marketing instructor in several Twin Cities high schools. I left the marketing industry and kind of wanted to get back into journalism again — telling stories, talking to people, having the sort of end goal be informing people and truth instead of gathering information to sell products, which is what I was doing in marketing.
“So I started to look for new jobs, and I also wanted to get back into education, like working with high school-age students, because I had been doing that through my college newspaper, and that’s when I found the job at North News, which was for an editor/publisher position of the monthly paper, and then also the task was to build and run a youth program for high school journalists at North High School. So, I applied for the job and got it, and that’s how I ended up here. It was really lucky.”
What happens during a typical day on the job?
“I feel like my day as an editor is different maybe than other editors, just in the sense that I usually start working around 7 a.m. and I prep for my class at North High which starts at 9:30. I answer emails. I just do all the sort of little logistical things related to the editorial side of the paper, and also the business side of the paper. Then I go to North High for class from 9:30 until about 11 a.m. I co-teach my class with another teacher at North High, but we both are sort of leaders in the classroom, so very much teaching-focused when I’m there. Then I usually spend my afternoons doing more logistical stuff for the paper — handling things, meeting with potential funders and advertising customers, occasionally going to events.
“When it’s closer to the paper coming out, I’ll actually do some writing in the afternoons usually, and then in the evenings that’s when I do a lot of reporting. So going to community events, or interviewing people after they’re done with work, so it’s a full day, and I wear a lot of different hats throughout the day. And it’s sort of a combination of interacting with youth in the morning and then carving out time for me to just be quiet in my office and get stuff done, and then being out in the community reporting.”
What kind of hours do you work?
“I would say I work about 7 a.m. to, I mean it sounds terrible, it sounds like I work a ton, but I work probably like anywhere from 7 a.m. to anywhere between 5 and 9 p.m., depending on the day. The good news is that my days are pretty flexible in the sense that I can be like, ‘I’m going to the gym from 1–2 p.m. because I have free time to do that,’ or, ‘I’m going to go get breakfast after my class,’ or like, ‘I’m going to run home and let my dog out’ or something. So, I’m working a ton of hours, but my personal and professional are very intertwined. It’s not like I’m just straight working all throughout that time.
“I would say I work a total of at least 60 hours a week, maybe a little more sometimes. It’s definitely is a big job, and I knew that going into it. I knew I would have to make it my life to some extent, but I live not technically in the geographic boundaries of this community, but I live literally a half-mile away, so it feels, again, it’s not like I get up in the morning and have a long commute that’s removed from my personal life — they are intertwined. So I work a lot, but it doesn’t feel super taxing all the time.”
“So I think just being clear about which hat I’m wearing, and then also being really clear about my own subjectivity in my writing in the paper.”
How do you find balance between your social and professional life?
“That’s a hard one honestly, because I spend so much time in this community. I’m not in the direct neighborhood, but I do a lot of my shopping and eating and things in this neighborhood, and so I struggle a bit with it. I think I try to be really clear about what role I’m playing when I’m in spaces. So, going to a community meeting and being like, ‘Hey, I’m here as a reporter, I’m going to take photos,’ versus, ‘I’m a reporter, but I’m actually here because I live here and care about this issue. I’m not going to write anything about it.’
“So, I think just being clear about which hat I’m wearing, and then also being really clear about my own subjectivity in my writing in the paper. And then socially, I try to maintain relationships that do give me a bit of a breather from reporting on north Minneapolis, so in my time when I’m not working, I try to go other places and do different things with different people.”
Do you have a mentor or someone who most inspired/impacted your career? How did this person influence you?
“Yes, several. One I would say is Tom Nelson, who is the student media adviser at my university. He was the adviser of the newspaper, The Loyolan. He, I think more than anyone else, taught me how to strategically guide a newspaper. There are a lot of decisions you have to make as an editor, and I could always call Tom and say, ‘Here’s the situation, here’s how I want to cover it, what do you think? Can you point me to other examples of other schools or publications?’ So, really, just helping me develop a sort of inner sense of how to take risks and how to stay responsible with the newspaper.
“Another one is Lucy Swift, she’s the former director of partnerships for TPT, Twin Cities Public Television. She’s kind of a new mentor of mine, but she’s been so instrumental for me in just helping me build more strategic relationships with the paper, not necessarily the reporting ones but the important business ones, and connecting me to people who sort of do more work in the Twin Cities.”
“But I think it’s really sort of basic fundamental aspects of connecting with students and connecting with community that I love.”
What is your favorite part of your job?
“It’s a tie between teaching at North High, kind of educating and inspiring the next generation of journalists, and just reporting out in the community. I also love the fact that I am the leader of this newspaper and get to guide its strategic journey. But I think it’s really sort of basic fundamental aspects of connecting with students and connecting with community that I love.”
Least favorite?
“I think sometimes the hours. I think there are moments when I crave a little more balance, but it’s still a small price to pay for the awesome dynamic job that I have.”
What is one editing horror story?
“You know, it’s funny — this job, I haven’t really had any, and I knock on wood so hard for that. But one from my previous editing jobs was running my college newspaper. We had a reporter interview a student veteran on campus and it wasn’t until our copy editing and fact-checking process the night before the paper was supposed to go to print that all of a sudden we started to really see some red flags in some of the things that the student had said. We kind of started to question, “Is he really a veteran?” Which was scary and big, because obviously we didn’t want to run a story with a fake veteran in our newspaper but we also didn’t want to call into question someone who had potentially served our country.
“We made the call to not run the story an hour before the paper went to print, so we had to quick design something up to fit that space — I can’t even remember what we did, but it was a really long process that followed where we realized that that student had actually been pretending to be a veteran, which had some pretty serious consequences for him. He was receiving benefits for service that he hadn’t actually done, and he had been bragging about his abilities as a sniper, which was really scary to our school community. As a newspaper, it felt like a few horrifying days as we had school leaders being like, ‘You can’t run anything about this in the paper because this is a dangerous kid,’ so there was pressure coming from that end, and then there was also pressure from the community because other people were starting to catch onto this because this student was being more bold in his attempts to tell his story publicly. More people were coming forward and saying, ‘Look, can you investigate this? Something is not right here.’
“As an editor, it was a really difficult time balancing a sense of responsibility for the community’s well-being with the community’s need and desire to have information about what’s happening. I look back on that and I think we made the right decision not to run the story based on all the things that unfolded, but I remember it feeling like one of those situations where you can’t win. No matter what you do, it’s sort of, which bad decision do I do?”
Editing success story?
“I think in a lot of ways North News has been that for me. The paper has been in the community for 25 years, and I came in in February with this sort of tacit understanding of how the community felt about the old iteration of North News, and it was sort of my job to hear that and redesign it and relaunch it by March in a form that was going to get more traction and readers — there was a sense the readership was really low. So, I got to work in February and talked to as many people as I possibly could and launched a pretty different version of North News designed to be more accessible to people who maybe don’t consider themselves official newspaper readers.
“So far the response has been overwhelmingly positive. We have a website where we just put PDFs of the paper, but our web presence is primarily on Facebook. I have people reaching out to me constantly sharing things and talking about how they love North News. I think people, really, my sense is that people see it as the publication of the people of north Minneapolis and it celebrates North in kind of a media landscape that tends to be more negative about North Minneapolis. Just in the way it sort of instills pride in North Minneapolis among the people who live here while not shying away from some of the harder stuff that happens here — that feels like a real success to me.”
If you weren’t working at North News, where would you want to be employed?
“This changes like every day, but I think today I would want to be working in the school as a journalism adviser, like a school newspaper adviser. I would want to work full-time with high school students to produce a paper for their school.”
“Go somewhere where you can make mistakes, I think, and take risks. Hopefully not big mistakes, but go somewhere that can afford to let you work on big important things.”
What advice would you give to journalism students starting to look for internships and experience?
“Go for experience over name. If you can work at a prestigious publication, amazing, but I think more than anything just seeking out places and media publications that just have a real need for reporters, so that you can dive in and write as much as you possibly can and want to. I think practice is everything, and I think sometimes some of the smaller and less-resourced news organizations you can get professional experiences and I totally recommend looking for things like that, where you can insert yourself into versus applying for something at a major publication, which will not be having you writing cover stories. Go somewhere where you can make mistakes, I think, and take risks. Hopefully not big mistakes, but go somewhere that can afford to let you work on big important things.”
Based off O’Keefe’s responses, editing and running a whole newspaper by yourself is as stressful as it sounds — yet so worth it at the same time. I connected with O’Keefe’s writing horror story, except I wasn’t the editor at the time. I was the reporter whose subject of my story was raising red flags from a mug shot found by editors the night before publication. The response was the same — difficult but smart and timely decision-making, and improvising when a story falls through. O’Keefe’s passion inspires me and encourages me to keep taking on big stories and taking risks.
Although journalism isn’t the highest-paying job out there, it seems to be one of the most rewarding careers. Our job as journalists is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Who else can say something so cool about their careers? O’Keefe’s passion for educating the next generation of journalists inspires me, as well. I wanted to be a teacher, elementary through high school, so I can imagine myself being an educator one day. It’s nice to know that I don’t have to choose one thing, because Kenzie is a teacher and runs a whole newspaper by herself, which gives me hope that I can at least teach and be a reporter at the same time.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
