Andrew Keatts, the new editor and general manager of Times of San Diego. (Photo courtesy of Andrew Keatts)
As a 12-year-old, Andrew Keatts literally saw the writing on the wall when it comes to news that both informs and delights.
His Pop Warner football team had won a championship. The Columbia Flier, the community newspaper in the town outside Baltimore where he grew up, wrote an article about the victory. Keatts cut out the story and displayed it in his bedroom for years.
The experience highlights how Keatts intends to bring a personal touch to the Times of San Diego when he takes over Sept. 8 as general manager and editor.
“This is a chance to build. You talk to people and listen to them,” Keatts said on a recent sun-splashed afternoon over a beer in San Diego’s South Park neighborhood. You need to show your audience “you’re trusted, part of the community and you share their values.”
Keatts, 41, a veteran San Diego reporter and editor, succeeds Times of San Diego’s founding editor Chris Jennewein, who plans to step back from daily editing duties after more than a half-century in newsrooms. He will continue in a role developing community partnerships.
Jennewein built Times of San Diego into a comprehensive source of online news over the past decade. Its influence grew substantially in May with the addition of the seven trusted weekly news sites of the San Diego Community Newspaper Group.
“Andrew is the right person to build on Times of San Diego’s success and take it to the next level. I’m excited to hand off the baton to a new generation of editorial leadership,” Jennewein said.
Both Times of San Diego and the community news group are now part of NEWSWELL, a nonprofit based at Arizona State University devoted to transforming local news. In addition to Times of San Diego, NEWSWELL also manages Stocktonia in Stockton and is reimagining the Santa Barbara News-Press. NEWSWELL provides back-end operations and strategy, so local journalists can focus on local news.
Keatts vows to bring a fresh perspective to the Times of San Diego by broadening and deepening its coverage. Alongside the steady flow of daily news, he envisions more sharply written feature stories, investigative work and expanding neighborhood reporting across San Diego County. There may even be some long-form magazine-style articles, once the province of San Diego’s alt-weekly newspapers.
He aims to fill the gaps left by the overall decline in the area’s news industry.
“So much has been lost from local coverage. It’s not a matter of replacing it all at once,” Keatts said.
His exposure to the joys and importance of journalism came early. His mother was the adviser to a high school newspaper. But his own news career didn’t begin right away.
He became a bartender after graduating from Ohio Wesleyan University. It was during that time he visited a friend in San Diego. Naturally, he loved the city and turned his short visit into a yearlong stay.
Keatts picked up work where he could, including experiences unique to San Diego. He even worked as a guide for the kayak tours in La Jolla’s sea caves. Idyllic as that may have been, he returned to Maryland to be with wife-to-be Carly and entered journalism as an editor of What’s Up? Annapolis, a regional magazine.
Memories of the beaches and swaying palms continued to pull at him, however. After all, San Diego was the perfect place to pursue not only a career but also to revel in a lifestyle that fed his passion for the rock music scene. Keatts is a diehard music fan, whether it’s indie, improv, jam bands or surf rock. He stays in shape by running 25 to 30 miles a week between activities with Carly and their two sons, ages 5 and 8.
From Maryland, Keatts continued to mail out resumes, seeking to return to San Diego, and in 2010, one stuck. He was offered a job to become the City Hall reporter for The Daily Transcript, which proved to be a terrific training ground.
“You had to publish a story every single day,” Keatts said. “It’s such a great discipline. It teaches you to accept the story you’ve got and write it.”
Three years later, another exciting opportunity arose, an investigative reporting position at the Voice of San Diego. He immersed himself in the operation’s lively, feisty, take-no-prisoners approach to the news.
“We were a dog with a bone when we broke a big story,” he recalled. “We would grab the powers that be by the lapels and demand a response.”
Some of his biggest scoops came by digging into the San Diego Association of Governments, a regional planning agency known as SANDAG. Keatts broke a succession of stories in 2016 that showed how the agency produced financial and population studies it knew to be wrong, yet passed off as fact when it came to trying to persuade voters to pass ballot initiatives. He said SANDAG even had a server that it kept under wraps to try to shield itself from his public records requests.
The resulting scandal led to the resignation of SANDAG’s CEO and prompted the California Legislature to pass reforms, Keatts said.
With that kind of hard-nosed reporting under his belt, Keatts moved into the editing ranks during his decade at Voice of San Diego. First, he became an assistant editor, and then was promoted to managing editor. Looking for a new challenge, he joined the San Diego arm of Axios, the respected national news organization. But he said it didn’t give him the satisfaction he sought, a desire to build and run a growing news-gathering operation.
That drive brought him to the Times of San Diego, which he says is “comprehensive in a way that other news outlets in this town are not.”
He is excited to bring new stories to both a Times of San Diego audience as well as those who read the community newspapers and newsletters. They include the La Jolla Village News, Beach & Bay Press, Peninsula Beacon, Uptown News, Downtown News, Mission Times Courier and La Mesa Courier.
“I think the potential is huge,” he said.