Kiri Walker
Writes the entertainment pages — celebrity profiles, explainers and trending stories, checked against the record before they go anywhere near a draft.
About Kiri
Kiri writes the entertainment side of the work — celebrity profiles, explainers, and the trending pieces that arrive quickly and go stale faster. She works from Wellington, which turns out to be useful. Most entertainment coverage online is written from one country’s point of view, and hers is not.
Her degree is in Media and Communication, with the focus on digital journalism and online publishing: research method, media ethics, audience behaviour, and how a story actually travels once it leaves the source. The ethics half matters more in this subject than most people writing in it care to admit.
She began on lifestyle blogs and entertainment publications — biographies, explainers, event coverage, personality features. Search came into it later, once she started noticing the distance between what people were typing and what the articles actually answered. Five years in, three of them here, she handles both halves.
What she works on
How she got here
Education
Bachelor’s degree in Media and Communication — digital journalism, online publishing, research method, media ethics and audience behaviour.
Early work
Lifestyle blogs and entertainment publications — biographies, explainers, event coverage and personality features.
Into search
Keyword research and search-intent analysis, picked up on live entertainment pages where the gap between the question and the answer is hard to miss.
Now
Celebrity and entertainment content for Infinity Linkers clients, with more than five years of writing behind it.
What she does at Infinity Linkers
Entertainment is one of the few subjects where the facts genuinely move. A credit changes, a project gets announced, a relationship ends. So Kiri starts by working out what is actually on record at this moment — dates, public statements, career credits — before deciding what the article is going to say.
Then the search half: what people are actually typing about this person or this story, which is rarely the phrasing a headline would use. She builds the structure around those questions, so the thing somebody came for sits near the top instead of four paragraphs down.
She also goes back over what has already published. An entertainment article that was accurate in March can be wrong by August, and a profile nobody has revisited stops being an asset fairly quickly.
On record, or not stated at all
Kiri’s rule on this kind of content is short: only what is publicly on record, and say so plainly when something is unconfirmed. Entertainment writing has the reputation it does because so much of it treats rumour and fact as the same material. That is dishonest, and it is also — now that search engines weigh who they can trust — a quick way to lose a page whatever standing it had.
Away from work she goes to live music and independent cinema, photographs the places she travels to, collects film posters, and reads more entertainment magazines than she will admit to. A fair amount of what she notices there ends up being useful at work, which is probably how most people end up in this field.
Posts by Kiri Walker
Articles written by Kiri will be listed here as they publish. In the meantime, the full blog is worth a look.
Visit the blog →