Ann Marie's World

From our April 2001 issue: Ann Marie Lipinski may be the most powerful journalist in Chicago. She climbed to the top of the Chicago Tribune masthead in February, becoming the first woman to edit the daily in its 154-year history. In a long career there, she's already put her mark on the paper, promoting good writing (some say at the cost of solid reporting) and advancing her crew of literate colleagues (dismaying others on the staff). She's got more plans, including a redesign. Still, can her vision lift the Trib?

(page 2 of 5)

The Tribune today is studded with examples of literary technique that in some cases is based on extensive reporting and, in other cases, may showcase writing talent that doesn't appreciably add relevant information to the story. The first installment of "Gateway to Gridlock" was presented in three "Acts" and an "Epilogue." An examination of how a woman was killed by window glass that fell from the CNA building was presented as "a story in two parts," while a series last year called "The River Congo" was "a journey in three parts." "Partners in Peril," which chronicled the events leading to the death of rookie police officer Michael Ceriale, was presented in serial form, and indeed Lipinski says the newsroom was flooded each day with phone calls from readers who wanted to know what happened in the next day's installment, even though, as she points out, everyone already knew that in the end Ceriale died. (Daily sales rose by 20,000 copies for each of the four days "Partners in Peril" ran, according to the Tribune's media relations office.)

These projects hardly lacked outstanding reporting. But "telling a story, not just telling the news," as several Trib staffers referred to it, can be a perilous game. Chicago Reader media critic Michael Miner praises "Gateway to Gridlock" but articulates a concern several other reporters expressed. "There's a temptation to fill in the blanks that reporting always leaves you with, in order to smooth out the narrative. On the other hand," he says wryly, "your stories become more readable and probably attract a larger audience."

Lipinski bristles at the notion that writing trumps reporting in her newsroom. "To choose between reporting and writing is kind of like choosing between water and oxygen. To get through the day, you probably need both," she says. "Sometimes it's the way we tell the story that draws people in."

The attention Lipinski gives to large-scale projects has resulted in another complaint. Most newspaper editors are used to hearing reporters gripe that they don't have time to get away from the daily grind to take a hard, sophisticated look at a topic. Some Tribune reporters complain that the editors are so enamored with the big story that they don't care about daily beat reporting. That's also the view, although for a slightly more complicated reason, of one of America's best-known media observers—a view put into the public eye last fall.

* * *

In 1979, David Halberstam examined CBS, Time magazine, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times in his book about the rise of modern media, The Powers That Be. Last September, in the media watchdog magazine Brill's Content, he published an essay adapted from a new introduction to the book. The essay was called "The Powers That Were," and Halberstam used the Tribune Company, which wasn't examined in the original book, as an example of a news organization that, in his view, eschews greatness because of its relentless drive for profits. (The argument echoes the thesis of former Tribune editor Jim Squires's 1993 book Read All About It! The Corporate Takeover of America's Newspapers.)

In his Brill's piece, Halberstam says the Tribune "gives off the feeling of an ownership whose passion is for its stock, not its readership nor the news it is reporting." Halberstam says he read the Tribune closely and developed relationships with several of its reporters during his stay here three years ago researching his 1999 book on Michael Jordan. In essence, he argues that the company doesn't reinvest enough of its massive profits into the newspaper, instead spending just enough to maintain a veneer of credibility and cultivate multimedia stars. For example, he says, high-paid columnists and specialty writers who can be promoted through the company's various media outlets—TV, radio, the Internet—are valued far more than reporters with the less glamorous but more significant jobs of covering city beats.

The article prompted James O'Shea, a Tribune editor whom Lipinski has since promoted to be her managing editor, to object in a letter to Brill's. O'Shea pointed to the paper's many projects, including its nationally recognized examination of the death penalty, as clear examples of the paper's passion for journalistic excellence. In the same letters column, Halberstam stood by his arguments.

When I talked to Halberstam in January, he was even more forceful in his criticism, accusing the paper's management of calculating just how much serious journalism it had to do to protect its "brand" while letting the rest of the paper go to hell. "They came up with a formula and they showcase certain kinds of people and certain kinds of stories—'Look how good we are,'" Halberstam says. He accuses O'Shea of selling out his journalistic values to the bean counters. "I read O'Shea's letter," Halberstam says, "and I thought he should be ashamed of himself."

In a fierce defense, O'Shea says Halberstam underestimates the quality of the Tribune's projects. "With the demise of a lot of investigative reporting across the country, we decided we wanted to make this place a mecca for that. . . . [W]hat we're engaged in is a more creative form of investigative journalism." And Halberstam, O'Shea says, has "no evidence whatsoever that anything's downhill" because of the paper's commitment to projects.

Halberstam doesn't know Lipinski. But the situation makes him suspicious. The corporate executives who run a paper like the Tribune, he says, "find an editor who fits their value system, someone who is popular and well liked, and they make it very, very profitable" with a bonus system for meeting financial goals.

Those goals are quite high. The Tribune Company's profit margin is among industry leaders and has grown steadily since the company went public in 1983. In 1989, the profit margin was 17 percent; in 1999 it hit 23.9 percent. Both figures dwarf margins at most non-media companies. (In 2000, the company's margin slipped to 21 percent, probably due to its acquisition of the less profitable Times-Mirror Company.) Tribune  newspapers have an even higher margin—29.2 percent in 1999—than its media empire overall. The company's annual report does not break out the Chicago Tribune's financials.

Another high-profile observer, New Yorker media critic Ken Auletta, researched the Tribune for a 1998 installment in the American Journalism Review's series State of the American Newspaper. Auletta's article, called "Synergy City," explored the Tribune Company's approach to delivering news across media platforms. Auletta concluded that the Tribune Company management was not oblivious to the importance of the newspaper's integrity, but still risked inadvertently damaging the paper by relying too heavily on market research and advertiser desires, instead of journalistic enterprise.

An editor facing these issues today, Auletta says, has the complex task of satisfying corporate bosses while protecting the franchise. "In the new world order, an editor has to walk in both worlds, has to be able to read a budget, to control costs, to sell the publication and market it, to worry about demographics and serving a readership desirable to advertisers," he told me. "If you don't, you're not going to be editor for very long. The question is, does the editor have the balance to be able to walk with a foot in both camps, and be able to say to the suits, 'No, we're not going to go there'?"

Does Lipinski fill the bill?

"The newsroom people admire her. She stood in very good stead in her newsroom, but she also had the ability to get along with the suits. They felt comfortable with her, like she wasn't going to lecture them," Auletta says. "The question is, does she have the guts to say 'No,' not just to her reporters but to her bosses? That is a question of character, the testing of which is yet to be determined."

* * *

Photograph: Matthew Gilson

This article appears in the April 2001 issue of Chicago Magazine.

Did you like what you read here? Subscribe to Chicago Magazine »