My mission as a journalist is to render the invisible into bright, gleaming, indisputable visibility.

Over the course of her career, Kelsey has worked to amplify the voices of Great Plains farmers, rural teens, slaughterhouse workers, security guards, fast food employees, college students and cost-conscious grocery shoppers in dozens of her front-page stories for the Wall Street Journal and other news outlets. She’s written about America’s fraught relationship with butter, exposed risks in the use of pig blood plasma in livestock feed, and uncovered new health conditions in chickens, dubbed ‘Woody Breast’ for the streaks of dead tissue and hard, white fibers left in the breast meat, after years of genetic breeding for rapid muscle growth.

Last summer, Kelsey’s groundbreaking reporting in 2016 on a price fixing scandal in the chicken industry resulted in the federal indictment of four top executives of the largest U.S. poultry companies, charged by the Justice Department of conspiracy to manipulate chicken prices. Her reporting has proven that any beat can unfold into a sweeping story about what we value as a society, and how we imagine our food system, health and environment. 

In New York, Kelsey crafted her own beat on the future of work and how we learn to do our jobs, taking readers deep inside Uber during its scramble to replace cofounder Travis Kalanick and address complaints of sexual harassment by employees, and the aggressive hiring tactics used by Amazon.com and Unilever on college campuses. She’s landed huge scoops and broken news for the Journal on the plight of America’s grad schools, rigged rankings at Temple University, and the backlash against corporate diversity programs by (mostly) white men. Her work prompted University of Wisconsin-Madison to reverse their previously undisclosed plans to cut their flagship M.B.A. program amid falling enrollment, and fire the business school dean. Along the way, she’s helped redefine the “entry level” workforce and shown how we’re all adapting to the new world of work.