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As much as she was ready for a new professional challenge, leaving the Front Range where she’d lived her whole life was hard for Keely Walker. So she made a promise to herself—wherever she wound up, she’d still have her view of the mountains.

But not all mountains are created equal, as she learned when she interviewed for a producer position with KOMO, in Seattle.

“The news director asked me how I liked the mountains out there, and I told him they were beautiful,” said Walker (Jour’06), now nightside executive producer at KING 5 Media Group. “Then he told me, ‘Well, what’s better is that ours explode.’

“I was like, no, no, that’s not a selling point!” Walker said, laughing.

Maybe backyard volcanoes aren’t quite her thing, but it’s no question Walker has hit her stride since arriving in the Pacific Northwest. Since joining KING, a Tegna-owned, NBC-affiliated station, the self-described “Colorado girl, through and through” has rapidly climbed the ranks while producing journalism that’s both award winning and thought provoking.

Climbing the ranks

Moving to Seattle, she said, was a chance to challenge herself professionally without sacrificing those mountain views.

“I knew the Denver market inside and out after eight years,” she said. “A lot of people talk about Seattle news being smart news. People don’t want the surface story—you need to really dig into the news, which was a new challenge.”

It meant learning about things like salmon and orcas that don’t typically enter the conversation in Colorado, but what hasn’t changed are the fundamental skills she built studying broadcast journalism at CU and being a trusted leader in the media space.��

“I have such pride in being a CU alumna,” Walker said. “The campus is beautiful and the academics are great, but it’s more than that—it’s like, hey, we have astronauts, we have Nobel Prize winners. There’s a lot to brag about.”

Including, for the first time in a while, the football team. Walker remains a longtime Buffs season-ticket holder whose earliest visits to �Ǹ�Թ� involved playing on the turf at Folsom Field during a family weekend game.

More recently, she was on the field in the fall, after the Buffaloes defeated Nebraska in an early-season rivalry game.

“Some of my co-workers have been like, ‘So are you going to rush the field after every game now?’” she said. “You know, it’s been a hard few years, OK? Just let us appreciate this and do what we want to do.”

Hands on with the news

That’s also the motto that’s guided her career in news. In her current role, Walker is responsible for the nightside newscast. Early each day, she works with reporters to identify the most promising stories, coaching them as the news moves from pitch to production. She also leads a team of producers who make each broadcast come together.

“I’m a teacher, when it comes down to it,” Walker said. “I love teaching young producers, sharing my knowledge with them and then watching them succeed.”

Joyce Taylor, an anchor at KING 5 who’s been covering Seattle for decades, said Walker’s enthusiasm and positivity make her a strong mentor, whose hands-on involvement in sourcing and scripting help reporters become better at their craft.

“Keely is a great listener and communicator,” Taylor said. “In a newsroom, you find all different types of personalities. Having someone in a leadership role who can work with all those kinds of personalities is a huge asset for us.”

Walker’s work has been recognized with multiple Emmys, as well as awards from Peabody and Scripps Howard, but more important to her than hardware is impact. She’s extremely proud of a project she worked on as a producer shortly after joining KING 5 that investigated racial inequality, racism and racial privilege, especially in the Seattle metro area.

Facing Race was proposed in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the resulting uprising around the country; the 13-part series was impressive for both how it handled sensitive material and the relative skeleton crew that produced it during the pandemic.

“It was hard—I had to find a new comfort zone of talking about race, equity and inclusion, because we hadn’t seen this kind of a discussion on TV before,” said Walker, who produced the show on top of her daily broadcasts; Taylor hosted each edition. “But I look back at these episodes, and it’s like—dang, we really made people think.

“It’s the shining accomplishment of my career, and I think will be until it’s over.”

Following that award-winning series, the station created a dedicated unit—including a reporter, executive producer, photographer and support staff—for , which Walker said have consistently been supported by leadership. The show ran after the station’s Seahawks coverage ended, giving a controversial topic substantial coverage.