She explained how if the Chronicle doesn’t cover local events in the Bay Area, the system of checks and balances that journalism creates would fall apart.
“If the Chronicle goes out of business, the local stories wouldn’t be investigated and covered. The Huffington Post won’t send five people to cover City Hall if we go out of business. Bleacher Report is not going to send reporters to the Giants’ dugouts to report on performance-enhancing drugs. The tech blogs are not going to be writing about whether or not major tech companies are behaving badly or whether there’s corruption between tech companies and City Hall,” she said. “Nobody is going to do that sort of reporting if we go away. So I need to do a good job of making sure people understand that you have to support this newsroom if you want there to be checks and balances.”
Journalism, she said, plays an important role in every person’s life. “You do not have a right to an uninformed opinion,” she said. Good and honest journalism is how we gather the information for our opinions. “Everybody should have opinions,” she continued. “That’s what makes thriving communities. So how can you possibly get to justice and truth without information?”
It provides us with the information that we can use to instruct our identities. Through the formation of our opinions, we differentiate ourselves from other species. “How can you get to justice and truth without information?” she asked. “Being informed beings is the cornerstone of what makes us intelligent life forms.”
As the Editor in Chief, she has a responsibility to continue the legacy of the San Francisco Chronicle, the city it reflects and represent the newspaper in the best way possible. But with this immense pressure, Cooper views her job as an awesome responsibility. “I have the best job in the world. I get to meet really interesting people and a lot of different types of people,” she said. “I get to do public events where I get to tell people about the important work we do.”
For the future, she explains she wants to continue to carry out meaningful work. She said, however, there is plenty to be done in the present. “The Chronicle is a giant, giant resource for Northern California. I don’t think too much about what I need to do next, because right now, I have a pretty big job to do,” she said.