Audrey Cooper, a seasoned news executive with a reputation for occasional irreverence and a track record of helping transform two significant news organizations in the past decade, has been named the next editor-in-chief of The Baltimore Banner.

Cooper, 48, is the senior vice president of news and editor-in-chief of WNYC, the most listened-to public media radio station in the nation, having held that role since the early throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to that, Cooper was the top editor at the San Francisco Chronicle at a time when the organization emerged from years of steep financial losses to higher readership, solid profitability and a string of journalism awards.

“She’s smart, ambitious and she’s funny. And most importantly, she cares deeply about local news,” said Bob Cohn, the chief executive officer of The Banner. “She’s a first-rate journalist who managed two major newsrooms and took them both to new heights.”

At The Banner, Cooper will take the reins of a 95-person newsroom that is decidedly different from her prior posts. The Banner is just 3 years old, has attracted the attention of the journalism industry for its ambition and scale, and has already won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for a collaboration with The New York Times on Baltimore’s overwhelming number of opioid overdose deaths and the failure of the city to address it.

Cooper, in a telephone interview, stressed that she considers it her mission to help solve the crisis in local news. “If you look across the country to where people are doing it right, it’s not a coincidence that everybody’s first answer is The Banner,” she said. “It’s a really talented staff and a super-devoted leadership team. There’s nothing not to like.”

The Banner’s founding editor, Kimi Yoshino, left in June to become a senior editor at The Washington Post. The search to replace her involved discussions with dozens of credible candidates and was narrowed to about 10 semifinalists.

One of the youngest women ever named editor-in-chief of a major U.S. newspaper, Cooper took over the San Francisco Chronicle in 2015 at age 36. The paper was just beginning a financial turnaround after losing millions of dollars every year.

She is credited with helping to improve the quality of the paper by, in part, launching an investigative team, ratcheting up an accountability mindset across the newsroom and pressing the organization to be more audience-minded. Paid digital readership during her five-year tenure grew sixfold.

When she moved to WNYC in 2020, she faced immediate challenges. She was handed the difficult charge of integrating two newsrooms with vastly differing cultures: the radio station and a nonprofit news site, Gothamist. After a period of tumult, the organization’s audience engagement scores rose, the integration took hold and WNYC was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for the first time.

She increased the diversity of the staff at both news organizations.

The Banner was founded by Maryland businessman and philanthropist Stewart Bainum, who publicly committed $50 million to launch a nonprofit regional news organization at a scale not seen elsewhere in the nation, with the goal of supporting it until it became self-sustaining. Bainum’s intentions have been twofold: to give Maryland the best possible news organization ultimately supported by the community, and to provide the journalism industry a road map of success that can be copied elsewhere.

Cooper joins The Banner as it strives to achieve these goals, with notable successes. The Banner has seen rapid growth in newsroom staff, philanthropic giving, advertising revenue and subscriptions, which now number more than 70,000. It has 150 people in its combined business and newsroom operations, and just expanded into Montgomery County.

“We have great journalism. It’s getting greater, but we know we can reach even more people,” said Bainum, the chairman of Choice Hotels International. “We know we can have even more impact.”

Cooper was chosen, Bainum said, after the consideration of dozens of applicants. “She’s had a decade leading and improving two important newsrooms. She has battled through the toughest challenges in this industry. Both of those were turnarounds, unlike us, and she has come out an even stronger journalist.”

Cooper, he said, believes in spending a good percentage of time in the community. In San Francisco, she was known to cruise the city on a brightly colored Vespa, and she volunteered to give walking tours as a way to get to know it better.

“Audrey’s the ideal editor at the exact right moment — an innovative journalist with a strong sense of audience guided by refined and unwavering news judgment,” said Brian McGrory, a Banner board member who has been filling in as interim editor while chairing the journalism department at Boston University.

“The Banner newsroom is a special place: still new, ambitiously defining its relationship with readers, and mission-driven. Audrey will fit in effortlessly,” said McGrory, who was previously editor-in-chief of The Boston Globe.

Cooper grew up in Kansas and graduated from Boston University. She began as an Associated Press reporter on the West Coast but a year later switched to editing, becoming metro editor for The Record in Stockton, California.

She moved to a similar job at the San Francisco Chronicle, then rose through editing positions to become managing editor, a position she held for just four months before being named the interim editor-in-chief in 2013.

Cooper will begin work in Baltimore on Oct. 13, and her family will relocate to the city by the end of the year.