Girard, Keith

Keith Girard is the editor and publisher of The New York Independent, a New York City web magazine, and managing editor of the financial trade publication RIABiz, following a decades-long career leading The Daily Record, InvestmentNews and Billboard.

Based in Maryland

Org The New York Independent (Girard Entertainment & Media)

Role Editor & Publisher

Notable work and positions

The New York Independent (Girard Entertainment & Media) — Editor and Publisher
RIABiz — Managing Editor
Billboard — former Editor-in-Chief
InvestmentNews — former Editor-in-Chief
The Daily Record (Maryland) — former Editor-in-Chief and Vice President
The Washington Post — former reporter

Biography

Keith Girard is the editor and publisher of The New York Independent, a New York City-focused web magazine covering politics, culture and entertainment that his company relaunched in 2019 under the name of a 19th-century progressive magazine, The Independent, which had published from 1848 to 1928. Girard's career began in Washington, D.C., where he started as a reporter-intern in the Washington bureau of the South Carolina newspaper The State and covered the Watergate scandal as it unfolded in 1974. He became a reporter for The Washington Post in 1984, and later worked as a contributing editor and investigative reporter for the regional business magazine Regardie's and as a contributing writer for Washingtonian magazine and Business Month magazine in New York. His reporting during this period covered the U.S. invasion of Grenada, the Nicaraguan civil war, U.S. companies' provision of chemical-weapons precursors to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the savings-and-loan crisis of the Reagan era, the BCCI banking scandal and the Gulf War. In 1982, Washingtonian magazine named him one of the 100 future leaders of Washington, D.C.

In 1992, Girard became editor-in-chief of The Daily Record, a six-day Maryland business and legal newspaper, and editor of its sister publication, Warfield's Business Record. Warfield's was named the best regional business newspaper in the country by the Association of Area Business Publications in its third year of publication; Girard merged it into The Daily Record's expanded weekend edition in 1996, and the following year the AABP named The Daily Record itself the country's best regional business publication. Under his tenure the paper won more than 60 editorial awards from the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. Crain Communications later recruited him to take over InvestmentNews, a national business weekly, and his work there led VNU Business Media to name him editor-in-chief of Billboard magazine, where he oversaw a staff across five U.S. bureaus and one in the United Kingdom, opened a San Francisco bureau to cover digital music, and launched Billboard's first website and e-newsletters. He also served as senior vice president and editorial director of HNW Inc., a custom-publishing company serving high-net-worth clients, and wrote a syndicated column, “Business Intelligence,” that ran in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and CBSNews.com, in addition to contributing to Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Girard is currently managing editor of RIABiz, a trade publication covering the registered investment adviser industry, and remains editor and publisher of The New York Independent through his company, which has operated under the names TheImproper Network LLC and, more recently, Girard Entertainment & Media. He has won nearly two dozen journalism awards over his career for feature writing, general reporting, investigative reporting, editorial writing, headlines, and layout and design. Beyond journalism, he has written a nonfiction account of U.S. Marines in the 1991 Gulf War, Remembering the Gulf War, and two novels: the science-fiction thriller The Heidelberg Conundrum (2019), the first installment of a planned trilogy, and the horror novel The Curse of Northam Bay (2023). A New York Independent author bio has also credited him with a nonfiction book about Donald Trump, though a title was not specified in that source. Girard lives in Maryland.

Career highlights

1. Turnaround of The Daily Record and Warfield's Business Record, 1992–1997Led the Maryland business-and-legal newspaper and its sister weekly to back-to-back national “best regional business publication” honors from the Association of Area Business Publications, and to more than 60 combined editorial awards.

2. Editor-in-chief of Billboard magazineDirected a global editorial staff across six bureaus, launching the magazine's first website, its first e-newsletters and a San Francisco bureau to cover digital music.

3. Revival of The New York Independent, 2019Relaunched the name of an 1848 progressive New York magazine as a web publication covering politics, culture and celebrity news, serving as its editor and publisher.

The New York Independent
Website: thenyindependent.com
Author page: Keith Girard at The New York Independent