Ryan Y. Kellett is a senior editorial leader, news executive, and relentless adopter of new technologies. He is a 2025 Nieman-Berkman Klein fellow at Harvard University where he is studying new models for distributing and sustaining journalism.
Ryan was most recently VP of Audience at Axios Media. He joined in 2021, tripling visitors to axios.com and expanding Axios Local to 30 cities across the U.S. in his three year tenure. Prior to that, he spent 11 years at The Washington Post, starting as an interactivity producer and ending as Senior Director of Audience. He guided The Post through the mobile/social era of the internet (and the Bezos sale), quadrupling online readership globally and massively expanding digital subscriptions to over 3 million, as a core revenue stream.
At The Post, he led a significant expansion of audience functions to include social, SEO, live journalism, newsletters, subscriber engagement, young audiences, talent and editorial analytics. He was an author of the proposal on comments/communities that would become The Coral Project. Along the way, he covered three U.S. presidential elections and contributed to high-profile projects like the police shootings database and opioid files. Ryan and his teams have won multiple Edward R. Murrow, WAN-IFRA, Webby, and Online Journalism awards.
Ryan started his professional career at NPR as the first-ever social media intern at a simpler time on the internet. He graduated from Middlebury College, where he founded a microlocal blog and was blissfully unaware that he was committing acts of journalism from an early age.
Ryan is a proud 2021 graduate of the Asian American Journalists Association’s Executive Leadership Program and is a 2024-2026 ONA board member. He also is a coach for Blue Engine Collaborative and occasional teacher on audience, metrics and revenue topics.