Ryan Kellett
Co-founder
The Independent Journalism Atlas
Professional Bio
Ryan Y. Kellett is a journalist, industry consultant, and relentless adopter of new technologies.
In 2025, he co-founded The Independent Journalism Atlas to map credible journalism creators and build systems that help them get discovered, trusted, and fairly compensated. This follows his research on the creator economy as a Nieman-Berkman Klein fellow at Harvard University and teaching a course on content creation.
Ryan was previously 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 new 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 on the board of the Online News Association and serves as its Treasurer. He also is a board member of The Conversation US.
In 2025, he co-founded The Independent Journalism Atlas to map credible journalism creators and build systems that help them get discovered, trusted, and fairly compensated. This follows his research on the creator economy as a Nieman-Berkman Klein fellow at Harvard University and teaching a course on content creation.
Ryan was previously 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 new 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 on the board of the Online News Association and serves as its Treasurer. He also is a board member of The Conversation US.
Affiliation
The Independent Journalism Atlas
The Independent Journalism Atlas
Professional Member