We are delighted to announce the first editor of Downtown Voices – Brianna Kelly.

Brianna joins our team from the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, where she's been tackling stories in retail, restaurants, and transportation. Many of them have focused on things that are essential to the future of downtown, from Target's remote work policies to Uber and Lyft's threats to leave the city over proposed minimum wage policies to a new seafood spot coming to Nicollet Mall in November. She's also been covering interesting things in Southwest Minneapolis, from Broders' ditching its service charge to the new Mediterranean restaurant planned for Vo's Vietnamese and a whole lot more.

Prior to the Business Journal, Brianna had a bunch of interesting experience in journalism, including The Real Deal, Crain’s Chicago Business, and The Associated Press. Another one of her jobs that really jumped out to us was her time running On The Ground Ypsi, a local news organization that covered Ypsilanti, Michigan. Since we launched Southwest Voices, we've tried to cover Southwest Minneapolis like its own smaller community, and we think downtown Minneapolis should have the same thing.

Brianna has both a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from DePaul University. She lives in Northeast with her cat, Sushi.

If you have any ideas about things we should cover or stuff you'd like to see, shoot her an email – brianna@downtownvoices.news. You'll see a lot of her byline around here soon enough.