Announcement from Investigations Editor Peter Wallsten:
We are very excited to announce that Kelley Benham French, a gifted journalist who has helped drive distinctive journalism in newsrooms across the country, is joining The Post’s investigations unit as our first-ever narrative accountability editor.
In her new role, Kelley will oversee a team with the mission of harnessing immersive reporting, rigorous investigative work and exceptional writing to produce stories that hold powerful forces to account on matters of urgent national interest. Kelley, a natural teacher, is also eager to be a resource for journalists across the newsroom as a coach, mentor, sounding board and collaborator.
Kelley comes to us after most recently serving as senior editor for storytelling at The Dallas Morning News, where she edited signature narratives about topics such as the mass shooting at an outlet mall in Allen, Texas, and a monkey theft at the Dallas Zoo. She led an ambitious and penetrating project — Deadly Fake: 30 Days Inside Fentanyl’s Grip on North Texas — that engaged more than 30 journalists to tell 50 stories in a single month.
She also has served as a professor of practice in journalism in the Media School at Indiana University, where she helped build a talent pipeline over the last decade that infused The Post with distinctive voices such as Jess Contrera, Sam Schmidt, Danielle Paquette, Katie Mettler and Taylor Telford, among others.
Kelley previously worked for three years as senior editor for narrative and special projects at USA TODAY, anchored in the investigative team. She edited and co-wrote an illuminating series exploring the first enslaved Africans brought to Virginia called 1619: Searching for Answers, as well as the gripping account of an Afghan journalist’s escape from Kabul as the Taliban seized control of the country.
Prior to USA TODAY, Kelley edited narrative and investigative projects on contract with The Oregonian, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Tampa Bay Times and other outlets. Her contract editing led to a Pulitzer finalist in local reporting and winners of the Best American Newspaper Narrative competition, the Kavli Science Medal, Scripps Howard, National Headliner and Dart awards, among others.
From 2002 to 2012, Kelley was an enterprise editor and writer at the Tampa Bay Times, where she was a Pulitzer finalist in feature writing for Never Let Go, the story of the extremely premature birth of her daughter, Juniper. At the Times, she edited two stories that were Pulitzer finalists: Winter’s Tale, the account by John Barry of a baby dolphin with a prosthetic tail, and For Their Own Good, a revealing exploration by Ben Montgomery and Waveney Ann Moore of decades of abuse at a boys’ reform school.
Kelley is an alum of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, has taught narrative journalism in six countries and 14 states and frequently speaks at medical and nursing conferences on subjects related to extreme prematurity. With her husband, the Pulitzer-winning journalist and professor Thomas French, she is the author of Juniper: The Girl Who Was Born Too Soon, published in 2016 by Little, Brown.
Kelley will begin her new job on Sept. 30.
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