The Reporting Life: Interview with Fordham Alum Aislinn Keely
By Michael Reich
I had the pleasure of speaking with Aislinn Keely this week, a recent Fordham grad and professional reporter. We talked about her experiences at Fordham, her professional reporting life, and how Fordham shaped her life beyond college.
Aislinn graduated from Fordham in 2020 and has been writing professionally ever since. First she was with The Block, and then Law360. In 2017 she started doing reporting for The Ram about students who found themselves in the middle of a crypto bull run and that topic has stuck ever since.
Aislinn also worked at WFUV, Fordham’s public radio station. She was anchoring in their newsroom when someone who used to work at WFUV visited. They were at a startup called the Block, a journalistic outlet devoted solely to crypto. They knew Aislinn liked writing and thinking about money and crypto, topics not too many people were interested in at the time. It was a perfect fit.
The two were introduced and Aislinn joined their startup team as an intern.
“They came back and said, hey, you know, I'm looking for interns and people who can write about money and that did not interest a lot of people. But I had already been writing a little bit about money. I also needed an internship. It worked out.”
Aislinn stayed on at The Block as an intern until she graduated. After that, she moved into a full time reporting position. She wrote short pieces to keep her readers up to date with the ever evolving space that is crypto.
“The Block was a startup with a crypto focused readership, and it was a lot about speed. There's a lot of focus on getting the news out quick and making it readable. So I was writing more posts a day than I do now, but they were shorter and perhaps not as detailed in some cases, getting the news out fast was really the main focus”
While at The Block, someone from Law360 reached out to her and offered her a job. She was onboarded with an in-house crash course that prepared her for the in-depth regulatory legal cases she is covering now.
At Law360, her work is similar to that of The Block. Crypto’s pace hasn’t slowed down, but her role has changed. Now she also helps her team keep an eye on trends in her beat and pitch emerging stories.
“At Law 360, that's still important [speed], but now I would say that I do different things as a senior reporter. I also am in charge of collecting news, keeping an eye on what's going on in my beat and being something of a subject matter expert on the team. I'm writing every day and doing daily news, but part of my job is also keeping an eye on everything that's going on in the space and pitching stories.”
Her typical writing day starts with morning research and pitches with her team. She spends a lot of her time on Twitter because a lot of crypto news happens there (even though Twitter isn’t what it used to be).
“In the morning, I search around for news. I take a look and see if anything's been pitched. I’ll look for what other reporters already saw and if there's anything that's been pitched already. Then I'll go around and do my own search, looking at regulator sites. I also look a lot on Twitter because a lot of crypto news does happen on Twitter. It’s a good place to compile your lists and get a quick overview of what's going on — but I shouldn't say Twitter. I should say the site formerly known as Twitter!”
After finding beats in the morning, Aislinn runs things by her team and editor. Then, she writes and sends things for feedback to her editor and copy desk.
“I'll do my morning pitches and have a discussion with my editor about what I'm going to be working on for that day, pulling from some of these pitches, if there's anything that's calling out to be covered. Some of the stuff I pitch and that other people pitch might be assigned to other reporters. Sometimes it's getting on the same page. Maybe there's a crypto bankruptcy story, but am I going to take that or is the bankruptcy team going to take that? Then I write and send it off for an edit. I talk about that edit with my editor and send it to our copy desk and then be available for any questions from our copy desk. Then, hopefully it publishes. So that’s usually my day, just gathering, looking for what's going on, and reporting.”
It’s an intense cycle but her time at The Ram, WFUV, and The Block prepared her well for this sort of work.
“What I did with The Ram is very similar to what I do now… talking to people, looking into information that you can find that's publicly available, cross referencing it, checking in with people. Then you try to write it in the most readable way possible. Those are all things I did then and those are all things I try and do now.”
It sounded like her humanities education at Fordham gave Aislinn a lot of opportunity and contributed to her success. It helped cultivate her interests and gave her real world practice for life after college.
Aislinn agreed. She said, “The hallmark of my Fordham experience was the ability to examine a variety of things deeply, and to be encouraged to think deeply about them, especially when someone is not being forced to specialize, which we do so much of. I always felt the pressure to specialize and now I am in a specialist niche in a weird way, but that happened along the way that was not obvious or intended. I think Fordham was a really great place for that to happen organically.”