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?

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Though she was a few credits short of a degree, Lipinski arrived at 435 North Michigan Avenue a Chicago Tribune intern in the summer of 1978 and never left. (Sixteen years later, University of Michigan officials deemed her internships worthy of the needed credits and granted her a bachelor's degree in American culture.) A new pope was named that summer, and in an interview he mentioned relatives he thought he had in Chicago. "Ann Marie called everybody by that name in every Chicago area phone book, dozens of them," recalls Ellen Soeteber, then the Tribune's weekend city editor and now the editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It turned out the pope's relatives lived in Michigan. But Lipinski wrote a page one story anyway—an amusing read about the gaggle of Chicago families desperately searching their family trees hoping to find they were related to the new pope. The Tribune hired her.

After a few years as a features writer, she was transferred to the metro staff. She had the good fortune to get an assignment that initially didn't seem to hold much promise but that wound up greatly affecting the Tribune you read today. A New Hampshire woman had come forward to say she had falsely accused a Country Club Hills man named Gary Dotson of rape. Lipinski was paired with a reporter deemed so unpromising that he had been told to look for another job. His name was John Kass. "A former metro editor said that I couldn't report and I couldn't write," Kass recalls. "I thought my career was over and I was going to go into the produce business with my brother. Or I was gonna be a skip tracer and go after deadbeats."

The Dotson story was the city's great melodrama of 1985, a tale whose truth was buried under the strained credibility of both accused and accuser. It ended with the governor of Illinois, James Thompson, presiding over a hearing of the Prisoner Review Board. Thompson commuted Dotson's sentence despite believing him guilty.

Kass and Lipinski teamed up again to expose a scam involving the sale of "weeping" religious statues, and Kass's Tribune career was saved. Lipinski earned his undying loyalty for sticking by him when other colleagues stayed away. "That's when you remember your colleagues and friends," Kass says. "When you're the 'disappeared' one and they don't let you disappear."

Years later Lipinski and then editor Howard Tyner, now a Tribune Publishing vice-president, took Kass to lunch at Shaw's Crab House. "They sat in the nonsmoking section and ordered iced tea," Kass recalls. "I thought, This is bullshit; gimme a Camel and a martini." After some polite conversation, Lipinski handed Kass a rolled-up newspaper page tied with a ribbon. Kass was confused. "'That's page three,'" Kass recalls her saying. "'That's your page.'" It was her way of telling Kass he had been chosen to replace the late Mike Royko as the Tribune's signature columnist.

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Sometime around Christmas in 1986, Lipinski went to lunch with investigative reporter Dean Baquet, who later went on to become national editor at  The New York Times and now is the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, and metro editor Jack Davis, now the publisher of the The Hartford Courant. "Someone said, 'Let's take apart the City Council,'" Lipinski recalls. "Jack said, 'What do you mean?' We said, 'Look at everything they do.'" Investigative reporter William Gaines joined the project and about ten months later "City Council: The Spoils of Power" was published with an opening sentence that Lipinski today calls "so aggressive as to be obnoxious." It also had the benefit of being true:

The Chicago City Council, the largest and most expensive in the country, is a corrupted and inefficient body that habitually puts aldermen's personal concerns before the public good.

Over the course of a week, the Tribune laid bare the ethical wasteland of the council, from committees with million-dollar budgets that rarely met to aldermen who steered repaving funds to the streets in front of their homes. Lipinski's most memorable contribution was a story about "Wild Bill" Henry, an alderman who used his office to market Soul Cola, a soft drink sold at a supermarket chain whose owners were his biggest campaign contributors. The series won the Pulitzer Prize.

After a year at Harvard University on a Nieman Fellowship, the most prestigious  in American journalism, she returned to the Tribune to lead the investigative unit. There she began her mission to elevate the Tribune by bringing together the disciplines of feature writing and hard news reporting. "She's been a leader in that combining of ideas," says Gaines. In 1999, for example, Lipinski paired Gaines with jazz critic Howard Reich for a "historical investigation" of Jelly Roll Morton; they produced a series based on their findings that the jazz innovator was "the victim of the first great swindle in American recorded music . . . bled dry by an emerging music industry, his business associates and even those closest to him." On the Internet, the Tribune posted Morton recordings and video interviews with jazz greats. "She uses investigative techniques in a broader way instead of just [targeting] waste, fraud, and corruption in government," says Gaines.

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Photograph: Courtesy of Steve Kagan

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

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