Kyle Spencer

Kyle Spencer

She has an expertise in narrative storytelling, communications and local news audience-building. She is a frequent contributor on MSNBC, and often conducts journalism workshops and seminars.

Spencer spent five years reporting on her critically acclaimed book Raising Them Right (Ecco/Harper Collins 2022) which explores how radical extremists message anti-democratic ideals via social media, online celebrity culture and false facts.

Spencer’s 25 years of award-winning journalism inform her understanding of what stories matter and which ones motivate audiences. She has a particular interest in activating young people through the issues they care most about and a keen understanding of how social change happens in real-time. 

Spencer has written for New York Magazine, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, The Baltimore Sun, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The International Herald Tribune, The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina and many other publications. 

Raising Them Right is her first political book.

Spencer spent her journalism career exploring how people live and what matters to them. She has written about young Democrats, aging conservatives, Christian rockers, Harlem parents in the age of school reform, million dollar PTA's, marijuana etiquette and gay culture among young American Catholics.  In recent years, she has focused much of her attention on the ways in which politics, race, and class are impacting young Americans.

Timely, prescient, and heavily reported, Spencer’s intensely readable pieces identified trends, sparked controversy and generated conversation. They also helped her understand how systems worked, how social movements built followers, and how grassroots groups grew. She has a keen eye for detail and a striking understanding of why certain stories matter.

Spencer began her career as a college stringer for The New York Times while on staff at The Daily Tar Heel, the award-winning college newspaper at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1991, she became a newspaper stringer in Eastern Europe. She filed pieces for The Miami Herald, The International Herald Tribune, and The European, focusing on the social and cultural shifts taking place after the fall of the Iron Curtain.  She wrote about Polish theater companies grappling with their new artistic freedom, Europe’s burgeoning tech revolution for Newsweek International business supplements and the birth of private schooling in the Czech Republic for The International Herald Tribune. 

In 2012, Spencer wrote a series of stories for The New York Times about hyper-aggressive fundraising efforts at New York City’s well-to-do public schools, which launched a city-wide debate about public school inequity. The series was part of a crowdsourcing project she helped coordinate between WNYC Radio, The New York Times, and the education website SchoolBook. 

In 2014, she co-produced an award-winning Frontline episode about school resegregation.

Spencer makes frequent media appearances on National Public Radio, WNYC Radio, and local and national TV outlets. She speaks and moderates panels, annual conferences, and events.