Kelly Kolhagen is senior vice president/managing director at Hass MS&L, with overall responsibility for supervising the General Motors corporate issues communications account. She has helped lead teams that have developed and implemented effective campaigns to address safety, environmental and advanced technology issues facing the corporation.

Three of those programs won MS&L Silver Star Awards in 2002, 2003 and 2004. A program she helped create for GM’s OnStar subsidiary was a Sabre Awards finalist in 2004.

Kolhagen joined Hass MS&L in July 2000 following a 20-year career in newspapers, including an executive role in The Detroit News’ feature department, where she directed both daily content and long-term projects. Under her leadership, the section won the prestigious Penney-Missouri School of Journalism award, several Associated Press honors and many individual writing and editing awards by the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors.

She also helped research, conceive and implement the paper’s youth section and several award-winning initiatives for the paper’s Newspapers in Education program. She also helped develop and lead the paper’s first weekly home and garden section, Homestyle, and served as an entertainment editor during her 14 1/2-year tenure in Detroit.

Before she joined The News, Kolhagen was a reporter and copy editor at The Flint Journal in Flint, Mich., where she won an investigative reporting award for her work on exposing lax licensing requirements in the state’s child foster care system that resulted in convicted felons caring for wards of the state. She also covered education, consumer issues and suburban government, and was the first woman at The Journal to cover the police beat.

Kolhagen is a former adjunct instructor at Oakland University, where she taught news editing and reporting courses. She has served on a panel that evaluates candidates for Central Michigan University’s Lem Tucker Memorial Journalism Scholarship since the program’s inception more than 10 years ago.

A graduate of Central Michigan University, Kolhagen lives in Clarkston, Mich. with her journalist husband and two daughters.