Kelsey Ryan is the executive director of the Association of Health Care Journalists. She joined AHCJ in September 2022.
Previously, she was founder and publisher of The Beacon, a nonprofit news network serving Kansans and Missourians with newsrooms in Kansas City and Wichita.
Before that, she worked at The Kansas City Star as a data and investigative journalist. She was on the investigative team that was named a 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist in Public Service for its series on government secrecy in Kansas.
Ryan began her career at The Joplin (Mo.) Globe a day after an EF-5 tornado destroyed one-third of the city. She later worked at The Wichita (Kan.) Eagle, covering health care and later covering city government and investigations.
Ryan grew up in Newton, Kan., and graduated from Emporia State University with a degree in political science. She was editor of her college paper, The Bulletin, for two years and interned at the Student Press Law Center in Washington, D.C.
Outside of daily journalism, she worked in nonprofit management at the National Freedom of Information Coalition, a nonpartisan, nonprofit journalism organization that advocates for government transparency and press freedom. She was also a membership manager at Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers, a journalism trade association supporting news entrepreneurs. At LION, she connected members with resources to help them grow more sustainable businesses and helped research the digital news landscape.
Ryan has received fellowships from Investigative Reporters & Editors, the Association for Health Care Journalists, the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Press Foundation. She’s a former board member for the Institute for Nonprofit News and the Kansas Coalition for Open Government.
She’s a 2022 Google News Initiative Fellow in Poynter’s Media Transformation Challenge executive fellowship program and was selected for the 2022 Editor & Publisher “25 under 35” list of news publishing leaders.