WGBH News announced that Ken Cooper, formerly of The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, has joined the newsroom for three months as its first-ever editor in residence. Cooper is working with the WGBH News team generating story ideas, sourcing, shaping and editing content as well as planning, consulting and critiquing stories across WGBH’s radio, television, and digital programs.
“Ken is a great addition to our growing newsroom, and we hope that his fellowship will contribute to our never-ending goal to keep raising the quality of our local journalism,” said Phil Redo, General Manager for Radio. “His reporting experience and topic areas literally span the globe and these experiences perfectly overlap the aspirations for WGBH News: locally focused and globally aware.”
“I’m eager to join a cross-platform newsroom and to learn more about radio — a new medium for me,” said Cooper. “I plan to apply the skills and knowledge from my long newspaper career to help shape WGBH’s news agenda in a competitive market.”
Cooper has more than four decades of experience in the news business, reporting on politics, local and foreign governments, social policy and higher education. He is a contributing writer for the Banner, has covered the presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis and also served as The Washington Post’s correspondent for South Asia. In 1984, Cooper shared a Pulitzer Prize for special local reporting that examined institutional racism in Boston, and he remains the youngest African American journalist ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for journalism. Cooper became The Boston Globe’s National Editor just before the 9/11 terror attacks.
Cooper was a Fulbright Scholar at Cairo University in Egypt, and has held fellowships with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C. and at the Institute of Politics at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. Cooper is the co-author of Portraits of Purpose: A Tribute to Leadership with photographer Don West.
WGBH News is among the fastest growing local news providers in greater Boston and draws on the talent of a multi-platform newsroom that includes 89.7 WGBH Radio, Boston’s Local NPR, television and digital reporting. The WGBH newsroom continues to invest in substantive local coverage and has established dedicated desks for innovation, higher education and politics as well as unique partnerships to expand on that commitment, including with WNYC’s The Takeaway, PRI’s The World, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting and The GroundTruth Project.
