When Kelley Carter began her entertainment reporting career in her hometown of Detroit, her goal was focused: to amplify the community voices that her colleagues may have overlooked.
That formula has yielded remarkable success for Carter, who has since interviewed Hollywood and music industry royalty and reported from red carpets around the world. She is the senior entertainment reporter for ESPN’s Andscape and an ABC News Entertainment contributor who’s regularly featured on Good Morning America, ABC’s Nightline and GMA3. When Carter joined the NPF Widening the Pipeline virtual training in October, she offered fellows a powerful strategy:
Lean into your lived experience, as far as possible. Not only has Carter remained true to her Motown roots, she’s also made remarkable connections with entertainment legends who sense her authenticity during interviews. Here’s what she had to say about “keeping it a hundred” in the entertainment reporting game:
Fewer years of experience? Don’t sweat it.
Carter remembered those early days when she was the youngest person on the Detroit Free Press entertainment staff, the only woman and the only person of color. “What I used to say back then was that I would drive home listening to WJLB, the R&B hip hop station, and hanging out with my friends. Whereas my colleagues, I would say they’re probably listening to NPR and going home and drinking warm milk, going to bed. I’m probably older than them now. I’m going to call everybody up and apologize to them now.”
But rather than let lack of experience hold her back, Carter saw an opportunity. “They just had a different life experience than I did. And I leaned into that pretty early because I learned really, I guess when I was doing my internships that what was going to set me apart was figuring out what the holes were in coverage. And it’s honestly something that I tell people all the time who are starting out now, like, look for the holes because there always are holes. There’s always something that your newsroom is not covering.”
Leave pre-conceived notions at the door and let the conversations flow.
In a long list of career highlights, Carter says her interview with actor Tom Hanks stands out. She viewed the 2022 movie “Elvis” during that year’s Cannes Film Festival, and Hanks co-starred as Presley’s bombastic manager, Col. Tom Parker, in the movie.
Carter said she’d always had mixed feelings about Presley’s reputation and the perceptions of cultural appropriation that linger around his musical legacy. But she left that Cannes screening determined to interview Hanks about the role.
“The reason why this film was made was because of Tom Hanks. And when I thought about the totality of his career, I thought about some of his bigger projects like the “Philadelphia” and even “Forrest Gump.” He really kind of taps into the fabric of American history in a lot of ways and tackles things that at times are very unpretty to deal with. And so I wanted to talk with him about that, and I was blown away because I didn’t expect to get all of the things that I got from Tom and that interview. But he really went on talking about Black Wall Street and what happened there and how he was disappointed in the whitewashing of American history and that he grew up in Oakland. He was bused in and his experiences moving through the world as a white man, but a white man who grew up in a black environment and his social consciousness because of that.”
Carter sensed that Hanks was enjoying the conversation, which is an important strategy for getting interviewees to relax and open up. “For me, the challenge is always what can I get them to talk about and what conversation can we have that they’re not having with anyone else? And I feel like I absolutely nailed it with him.”
Choose your friends and mentors carefully. For Carter, peer support during her college years yielded invaluable career advice and a life-long friendship. She met fellow Detroit native Jemele Hill at Michigan State University, when the wise sophomore reporter took the newbie freshman Carter under her wing.
“She was just passing on information that she had gotten from (mentors) because of course she didn’t know everything at 19 years old. But what she knew was her mentors were gifting her and she was passing that on to me. And I mean, it was invaluable because I would literally not be where I am right now, wouldn’t be anything where I am right now if it weren’t for that friendship and that relationship and that generosity in sharing that knowledge. What I definitely always like to say about Jemele is that she’s someone who would be uncomfortable if she walked into a room and had a seat at a table and she was the only person who looked like her at that table.”
Today, the best friends are veteran journalists with myriad writing and broadcast credits to their names. And Carter’s latest stint as a co-executive producer yielded the Netflix docuseries “Memphis to the Mountain,” about a group of Memphis teens whose strenuous training on a local rock-climbing wall took them all the way to the peaks of Mount Kenya.
“A lot of them had never been on a plane, had never traveled outside of the city limits of Memphis themselves. And then to go to Africa and camp out and climb a mountain alongside these world champion mountain climbers, it’s inspirational and beautiful. And it really kind of tells you about the history of that neighborhood and the community but also gives you this very inspirational story about what it takes to do something like this.”
Access the full transcript here.
This fellowship is funded by the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for the content. To support the 2026 program, contact rjones@nationalpress.org.
