Last week, the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript welcomed Ryann Brooks as its new editor.
Brooks, a Pennsylvania native, most recently lived in Kansas, where she spent eight years at the Emporia Gazette. She started there as a reporter and was promoted to news editor in 2020. In 2023, the Kansas Press Association named her Journalist of the Year.
Brooks said part of what drew her to New Hampshire was family. Her father and brother both live in the state and her grandparents are from Rochester.
Brooks left the Gazette in 2024 for a job in marketing, but said she missed newspaper work and was eager to return.
“I love the connections you make with people when you’re interviewing. Bringing a story to life is really exciting in a lot of ways. I like to say that people tell me all their secrets and I write about them,” Brooks said, of what she loves about reporting.
She said editing allows her to step into the other side of things and help reporters craft a better story.
The Gazette, similar to the Ledger-Transcript, is a community paper serving a population of about 30,000. Brooks said that commitment to local news is what continues to draw her to community journalism.
“I think that community journalism is really important,” Brooks said. “Mainstream media, they’re not going to town council or Select Board meetings, they’re not going and seeing what cool things are happening in our schools, not talking about your neighbor that put an art installation in their yard. It’s really the backbone that we need to be in a healthy society, to be able to see those stories and know what’s happening in local governments and celebrate the cool things happening every day.”
Brooks and her husband, Drew, have two children, aged 17 and 11, two dogs and five cats. She enjoys crochet and hiking, and is excited to explore trails in the area.