The Baltimore Banner names WNYC’s Audrey Cooper as its next editor-in-chief

The Baltimore Banner, the promising and growing local news nonprofit serving the city and greater Maryland, has named a new editor-in-chief. Audrey Cooper, editor-in-chief of WNYC and former editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Chronicle, will take the reins in a new city on October 13.

Cooper replaces founding editor-in-chief Kimi Yoshino, who announced in May she’d swim against the tide to join The Washington Post as a managing editor. Brian McGrory, chair of the journalism department at Boston University and formerly the editor of The Boston Globe, has been serving as the interim editor of the Banner.

The Banner — which won its first Pulitzer Prize in May, less than three years after launching — recently dropped “Baltimore” from its domain name and announced it would expand its coverage in Maryland. Unusually for a nonprofit, the Banner has a paywall and more than 70,000 paid subscribers. With about 95 journalists, the outlet boasts one of the largest local newsrooms in the country. The Banner was backed by $50 million from the Maryland-based businessman Stewart Bainum Jr. in 2022. Once again, Cooper is arriving in a city she has not lived in before. (Her teenage son is in school in New York and she says she’ll be “a regular on the train” until she moves her family to Baltimore next year.) She said she believes the best local journalism is about context and knows how important it will be to forge strong connections in her new city. Cooper is a walking-tour enthusiast who has started to get to know Baltimore on foot and by working her way through the stack of books on her nightstand.

“I’m an old-school editor in the sense that the thing that I love to do is be out in the community talking to people,” Cooper said. “It’s probably a third of my job, and, in some ways, the best part too — to make sure that you’re doing things that the community wants and responds to.”

I asked Cohn, who joined the Banner in 2024 and worked as a journalist before he became a news executive, what keeps him up at night about the Banner. He said he doesn’t want the Banner to lose its “hunger” as it becomes a more established newsroom.

“I worry a bit about our transition from startup to this next phase. This is when organizations sometimes lose their scrappy energy,” Cohn said. “It can be good for us to be more buttoned-up, but only if we also maintain the edge that propelled us through the early years.”

Bainum was in the Banner office this week and said he spends about 15 hours a week on the nonprofit newsroom. (“I’m more passionate than that about it, but I have a job,” Bainum reminded me.) I asked him a question similar to the one I asked Cohn: With even some very well-funded nonprofit newsrooms going belly-up, what keeps him up at night about the Banner and local news more generally?

“Most of these [local news] operations don’t have scale,” Bainum said. “We’ve got to build scale. We haven’t solved the puzzle yet. We’re making progress. I feel good about it, but we have to keep experimenting and trying things and failing fast to figure this out.”

“The whole thing comes down to: Do you have great journalism or not?” he added. “Are you meeting the community? We have to be audience-focused, and it all starts in the newsroom. You can have the most sophisticated technology — and, increasingly, technology is important in any service — and you can have the greatest marketing and branding operation, but it doesn’t matter much if what you’re offering the public is not really desired.”

What can the journalists at the Banner expect from their new boss? Cooper says her Slack profile currently includes the line “I go to meetings so you don’t have to.” She says she’ll take a similar approach in her new newsroom.

“Let me take on the organizational and the business demands so you guys don’t have to worry about it,” she said. “In this day and age when everybody is so worried about business models and conversions and all of those things, being able to say ‘I have this part, you guys go out and do the shoe leather part’ is a really good message to send to a newsroom.”