Audrey Cooper
Editor-in-Chief, San Francisco Chronicle
One of Cosmopolitan’s ‘50 Fearless Women’ on how she’s taken the paper to record success; hiring a cannabis correspondent… and contrasting her city’s tech billionaires against a massive homelessness crisis.
Audrey Cooper is Editor-in-Chief of the San Francisco Chronicle. One of Cosmopolitan magazine’s ‘50 Fearless Women’ she joined as Assistant Metro Editor in 2006, and just nine years later became Editor-in-Chief – the first woman to hold the position in the publication’s 150 years, and the youngest-ever to fill the top post at a major US paper. In this in-depth interview, she shares the secrets of her amazing turnaround – from shedding staff and losing millions to a sustainable business with a record readership of 35 million; talks through innovations such as the re-introduction of an investigative team, and hiring a cannabis consultant to cover the now-legal marijuana industry; and fondly analyses San Francisco itself – contrasting the wealthy beneficiaries of the tech boom against a massive homelessness crisis, outlining how her paper is trying to be a catalyst for the solution.