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Peak performer

By Joe Arney

As much as she was ready for a new professional challenge, leaving the Front Range where she’d lived her whole life was hard for Keely Walker. So she made a promise to herself—wherever she wound up, she’d still have her view of the mountains.

But not all mountains are created equal, as she learned when she interviewed for a producer position with KOMO, in Seattle.

“The news director asked me how I liked the mountains out there, and I told him they were beautiful,” said Walker (Jour’06), now nightside executive producer at KING 5 Media Group. “Then he told me, ‘Well, what’s better is that ours explode.’

“I was like, no, no, that’s not a selling point!” Walker said, laughing.

Maybe backyard volcanoes aren’t quite her thing, but it’s no question Walker has hit her stride since arriving in the Pacific Northwest. Since joining KING, a Tegna-owned, NBC-affiliated station, the self-described “Colorado girl, through and through” has rapidly climbed the ranks while producing journalism that’s both award winning and thought provoking.

Climbing the ranks

Moving to Seattle, she said, was a chance to challenge herself professionally without sacrificing those mountain views.

“I knew the Denver market inside and out after eight years,” she said. “A lot of people talk about Seattle news being smart news. People don’t want the surface story—you need to really dig into the news, which was a new challenge.”

It meant learning about things like salmon and orcas that don’t typically enter the conversation in Colorado, but what hasn’t changed are the fundamental skills she built studying broadcast journalism at CU and being a trusted leader in the media space.Ìę

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Don’t touch that dial

Keely Walker is like a lot of journalists, in that when you ask her what her biggest challenge is, it’s that no one is watching. When she visited a CMCI class in the fall, “we asked the students who watches the news, and no hands went up,” Walker said.

Her dirty little secret? “I don’t have cable, either,” she said.

That’s not unusual for Generation Z—or the Seattle market, where engagement through mobile apps or over-the-top media services like Roku, Hulu or Apple TV is incredibly significant. So, her station typically airs content for TV first before repackaging it for digital distribution. “Our biggest business challenge is, how do you get people to watch when it’s not part of their routine?” she said.

Patrick Ferrucci, associate professor and chair of the journalism department, said curricular refreshes and conversations with his board of advisors are helping guide CMCI students toward new jobs in news.

“Journalism now is less platform dependent,” Ferrucci said. “There are still paths to traditional broadcast jobs, but what we’re increasingly trying to do is embed visual and multimedia journalism into all aspects of our curriculum, so that our students learn how to tell good stories regardless of format.”

“I have such pride in being a CU alumna,” Walker said. “The campus is beautiful and the academics are great, but it’s more than that—it’s like, hey, we have astronauts, we have Nobel Prize winners. There’s a lot to brag about.”

Including, for the first time in a while, the football team. Walker remains a longtime Buffs season-ticket holder whose earliest visits to Boulder involved playing on the turf at Folsom Field during a family weekend game.

More recently, she was on the field in the fall, after the Buffaloes defeated Nebraska in an early-season rivalry game.

“Some of my co-workers have been like, ‘So are you going to rush the field after every game now?’” she said. “You know, it’s been a hard few years, OK? Just let us appreciate this and do what we want to do.”

Hands on with the news

That’s also the motto that’s guided her career in news. In her current role, Walker is responsible for the nightside newscast. Early each day, she works with reporters to identify the most promising stories, coaching them as the news moves from pitch to production. She also leads a team of producers who make each broadcast come together.

“I’m a teacher, when it comes down to it,” Walker said. “I love teaching young producers, sharing my knowledge with them and then watching them succeed.”

Joyce Taylor, an anchor at KING 5 who’s been covering Seattle for decades, said Walker’s enthusiasm and positivity make her a strong mentor, whose hands-on involvement in sourcing and scripting help reporters become better at their craft.

“Keely is a great listener and communicator,” Taylor said. “In a newsroom, you find all different types of personalities. Having someone in a leadership role who can work with all those kinds of personalities is a huge asset for us.”

Walker’s work has been recognized with multiple Emmys, as well as awards from Peabody and Scripps Howard, but more important to her than hardware is impact. She’s extremely proud of a project she worked on as a producer shortly after joining KING 5 that investigated racial inequality, racism and racial privilege, especially in the Seattle metro area.

Facing Race was proposed in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the resulting uprising around the country; the 13-part series was impressive for both how it handled sensitive material and the relative skeleton crew that produced it during the pandemic.

“It was hard—I had to find a new comfort zone of talking about race, equity and inclusion, because we hadn’t seen this kind of a discussion on TV before,” said Walker, who produced the show on top of her daily broadcasts; Taylor hosted each edition. “But I look back at these episodes, and it’s like—dang, we really made people think.

“It’s the shining accomplishment of my career, and I think will be until it’s over.”

Following that award-winning series, the station created a dedicated unit—including a reporter, executive producer, photographer and support staff—for , which Walker said have consistently been supported by leadership. The show ran after the station’s Seahawks coverage ended, giving a controversial topic substantial coverage.

‘Doing the work because she loves the work’

Part of what makes her successful is that, even though there can be hard days in the news business, Walker finds ways to make work fun; her colleagues praised her sense of humor in the face of a demanding job.

“We’re here to seek the truth and solve problems,” Taylor said. “There is no task where Keely can’t find a way to get the job done, get the best information and meet the challenge, whatever it is.

“In these times, journalism has never been more important, and Keely sets a great example as somebody who’s doing the work because she loves the work and really sees the importance of journalism and its role in our democracy.”

Walker said she enjoys the challenge to be a little better every day, and to make the workplace more fun.

“If you talk to anyone in my newsroom, they know my laugh, because I laugh all day—I crack jokes and things like that,” she said. “People work better when they’re having a good time.”

In a recent visit to a CMCI class, she tried to share some of that perspective with a group of students.

“You need to find a way to unplug after those days when it feels like you’ve been hit by a truck,” Walker said. “Do that and the next day, you find you can laugh at work, you can find things to look forward to in the news world.”

She reinforces her own positive attitude by exploring her new home state, kayaking, and through a mix of reading “and really trashy reality TV. That’s how I escape the news,” she said, laughing.

Each fall, though, escape comes from one of her first loves.

“There’s a great alumni group in Seattle that gets together to watch football—and there’s more people showing up this year, which is fun,” she said. “And I usually make it back to Colorado for a couple of games, too. Some of my best memories from CU are just from being on that beautiful campus, and so much comes back to me when I’m walking through the quad or seeing the buildings where I took classes.”Ìę

“I’m a teacher, when it comes down to it. I love teaching young producers, sharing my knowledge with them and then watching them succeed.”
Keely Walker (Jour’06)