Kathleen Kelly: pioneer of radical Internet media

Kathleen Kelly who, with Bob Richards, was the New York Transfer News Collective, which broke the U.S. embargo on Cuba and distributed news reports from Havana’s Prensa Latina in the United States, died Jan. 22 following a stroke. She was 59.

Known to most as Kelly, she was an Irish Republican Army supporter and anti-war activist during the 1960s who used her training as a psychiatrist to help returning Vietnam War vets. New York Transfer was an early bulletin board system set up by Vietnam vet Bob Richards. It was used primarily by vets seeking to deal with the war and with their anger against the system that sent them there.

The bulletin board system was connected by phone lines; this was before there was an Internet. When the Internet was opened, New York Transfer was a pioneer participant. By 1984 the operation was renamed New York Transfer News Collective to reflect its change into a distribution network for radical news.

New York Transfer was the first radical news service on the Internet and it was widely recognized for both its editorial quality and its many exclusives and its nonsectarian distribution policies. The news service redistributed articles from a great many sources, including small and big newspapers in the U.S. and around the world.

It also distributed articles from revolutionary leftist newspapers, carrying articles ranging from Workers World newspaper to the Maoist Peru Communist Party’s press. New York Transfer began distributing Workers World articles in 1985.

The distribution went far and wide.

In the 1990s New York Transfer began to break the longtime U.S. embargo on Cuba. Kelly began transcribing and translating into English the shortwave broadcasts of news from Cuba and distributing them through New York Transfer. This caused a stir at the time, but it also raised a demand for more.

Working closely with Prensa Latina in Havana, Kelly and New York Transfer were able to set up a daily communications link into Havana that let articles and news reports as well as email from Cuba to be exchanged in the U.S. for the first time. The English-language edition of Prensa Latina continues to be hosted on New York Transfer’s Web server.

With the death of Kelly, New York Transfer has been forced to shut down. Bob Richards told Workers World, “I will always feel that Kelly fell in battle.” Messages can be sent to rrichard@blythe.org.