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 3 of 5)
THE EDITOR'S DAILY FARE Ann Marie Lipinski doesn't have time in the morning to read all the newspapers she'd like to get through—the Tribune, the Sun-Times, the Daily Herald, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal—so she spends a good part of her day sneaking peeks at the papers while she goes about her other duties. In this respect, she thinks, she's not so different from many of her readers. "The notion of reading the paper as a morning phenomenon is way out of date," she says. "It's just not the way people use newspapers anymore." The rest of her day is quite different from that of most of her readers, though, as she meets the obligations not just of a journalist, but of a corporate manager and a civic figure. On a recent day, for example, she met for two hours with part of the paper's redesign team, met for an hour with publisher Scott Smith and the company's vice-presidents, held intense discussions with two of her staffers about their career paths, worked on the remarks she would be making the following week as mistress of ceremonies for the mayor's State of the City address, and talked for 45 minutes with a human resources vice-president at the Tribune about job postings. She managed to sandwich in the daily 11 a.m. news meeting where the next day's coverage is mapped out, and the daily 4 p.m. page one meeting, where the editors of the news, sports, business, and features sections meet to pitch stories from their areas for the front page. And she found time to duck into a meeting the editorial board was having with U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R.-Ill.). After attending a circulation department awards ceremony at 5 p.m., Lipinski went home for dinner with her family. Then she did a little more reading. —S. R. |
None of the more than two dozen current and former Tribune reporters and editors I spoke to for this story questioned Lipinski's commitment to journalism, and it is clear she has had a lifelong romance with newspapers. That's why I found it strange that she was reluctant to sit for an interview for this article—it took six weeks to make it happen. Then, when I put a tape recorder on the table in her office, she was visibly discomfited. "Let's just chat," she said. (The recorder stayed off.)
What makes it more curious is that she has such a great story to tell about what most journalists would describe as a dream career. She grew up in Trenton, Michigan, a middle-class suburb of Detroit that she describes as "swimming pools, ice-skating rinks, good schools, neat houses." Her mother was an elementary school teacher, her father a barber who also owned a Baskin-Robbins ice-cream shop. The Lipinski home valued the daily paper. "The Detroit News—the largest circulation afternoon daily in America!" her father would proudly intone as he cracked it open. He gave the paper a thorough read every day, a habit he passed to Ann Marie, the eldest of four kids. Lipinski would later learn that her mother had once aspired to a newspaper career but instead had been steered toward teaching by Catholic school nuns who thought a newsroom wasn't an appropriate place for a woman.
But by the time she was in high school, Ann Marie could hardly think of doing anything else. "I was attracted to finding things out and telling people about them," she says. "And I loved the life, the newspaper milieu. I thought the newspaper had the most interesting students, funny, smart, different. Not a type. Other groups had types. The newspaper had all different types."
In her senior year at Trenton High, she edited the Trojan Trumpet. "They quit printing scores and who wore what to the dance and began printing relevant social issues," recalls Trenton school district superintendent Donald Kolcheff, then a Trenton High math teacher. "It caused quite a stir. Parents were concerned, and the faculty had substantial discussions of whether this was appropriate. She turned [the paper] into a sincere attempt to be a journalistic product."
Trenton's Class of '74 voted Lipinski most ambitious.
On the first day of her freshman year at the University of Michigan, she dropped off her belongings in her dorm room and hightailed it to 420 Maynard Street, the Michigan Daily newsroom, only to find the newspaper wouldn't hold its first organizational meeting of the year for another week. It wasn't long until she was covering Ann Arbor politics. "Somehow, walking in there as a freshman, she knew how to do this stuff," says Dan Biddle, a Daily colleague who later won his own Pulitzer Prize, and is now the deputy projects editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Lipinski also met her future husband at the Daily, freelance photographer Steve Kagan, whose work today appears regularly in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. (They live in Ukrainian Village with their seven-year-old daughter.)
In the summer between her junior and senior years, Lipinski interned at The Miami Herald, then returned to Michigan as coeditor of the Daily. "I learned that newspapers can't be democracies," she says. "In a page one meeting you can pretend it's a democracy, but at the end of the day somebody has to make a decision and be responsible for that decision."
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Reader Comments:
Sounds like a remarkable woman. It is a shame that she is leaving.
I agree with this: ".. Lipinski is not a wholehearted fan of readership studies—asking the public what kind of news it wants, and then dishing it out. She thinks such studies can be helpful, but she believes in the value of journalists' imagination. "Readers don't think, 'I wonder what the real story is of Michael Ceriale, the cop that was shot last year,' or 'I sure would like to read a series about Jelly Roll Morton,'" she says. "Readers don't ask, but we think it up and give it to them."
She's right. And her thoughts don't jibe with the new management of the Tribune.