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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Lipinski's ultimate success will depend a great deal upon her inner circle, a band of unusually loyal reporters and editors known as FOAMs—Friends of Ann Marie. FOAMs include Kass; literary and magazine editor Liz Taylor; architecture critic Blair Kamin and his wife, reporter Barbara Mahany; projects editor Bob Blau; and a corps of other high-ranking editors. Most are of Lipinski's generation, and many built careers together at the paper. FOAMs consistently and effusively praise Lipinski's passion, inspiration, leadership, writing flair, and news acumen. "You don't find very many editors who have that ability to inspire," says Papajohn. "She really has that spark."

Those who are not FOAMs, which means many of the rank and file, consistently portray Lipinski as insular and cold but fear the repercussions of speaking on the record. "Every Tribune reporter has a story about how they think Ann Marie hates them," one long-time Tribune reporter says.

Her newsroom friendships are so well known they have given rise to a long-running gibe that photos of her wedding party provide a more accurate portrait of Tribune power than the paper's organizational chart. And reporters palpably fear the political consequences of crossing—or even disagreeing with—a FOAM.

The loyalty she engenders may have another downside as well. "Some people are so eager to please, if Ann Marie says the moon is made of green cheese, some people would be out buying crackers," says former Tribune veteran William Recktenwald, a Lipinski admirer who now teaches journalism at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. "That can be a weakness. But I think she's able to see that. The weakness is not with her; it's with some of the people trying to curry favor with her."

Editors are often judged more by the decisions they make at crunch time than by the way they manage on a daily basis, and every editor in the country was tested by election night 2000. At the Tribune that night, Randy Weissman, an associate managing editor, wrote a headline that, as Lipinski says, got better and better as the night went on: "As Close as It Gets." The presses were already rolling when the Tribune learned that Al Gore had called George W. Bush and conceded, and was now in a limo on his way to make a concession speech to his supporters. That was a problem. "We weren't prepared to call it because in our minds it wasn't over," Lipinski says. "But when the damn Vice-President has phoned it in, that's a different story." And a different headline. After some goading, Lipinski issued for the first time in her career that classic command of newspaper mythology: "Stop the presses!"

But instead of changing the headline, she waited, sweating out images in her mind of "all those empty porches all over Chicagoland. No blue bags anywhere." Nearly 40 minutes later, after Gore rescinded his concession, Lipinski restarted the presses full throttle. Weissman's headline held.

The Tribune's election edition was sitting on a table in her office when I visited, along with two different New York Times editions from that night, ensconced in plastic with a note from former Tribune political editor Michael Tackett, who has left for U.S. News & World Report. Tackett bought the papers on eBay for Lipinski. His handwritten note says: "Whenever you are faced with doubt remember the moment that—when it mattered most—you got it right. Best, Mike."

There is also on the table a photo of a man holding four election editions of the Sun-Times, each with a different headline. "There's only one there that got it right, you'll note," Lipinski says. She's referring to the headline "Hillary Wins." "Can you imagine?" Lipinski says. "We would never do this on a presidential election night."

In the past decade, the Tribune has struggled to find its place in a television and Internet age. Lipinski says the paper is emerging from this identity crisis with its core mission intact. The days of debating "Why should we put this on page one when it will be on all over the news tonight?" are over, she says. "For a number of years we weren't putting stories on page one that readers expected to see. But readers want to find out what the Tribune knows about it," she says. "News sells newspapers."

In another small break with recent journalistic fashion, 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."

The Tribune's redesign is intended to deliver the news more efficiently, with the front page offering a surer hierarchy of the day's top stories and doing a better job of drawing attention to the day's surprises. But the true test of the paper's success may be whether Lipinski's energetic vision seeps through her inner circle into the entire newsroom, flowing down the editing chain and bolstering the sections and pages inside. "You want somebody who is setting a tone. That job is to be the person who lets you know what direction the paper is going, what kind of work is expected, what kind of work is rewarded," says Steve Mills, a reporter on the paper's death penalty series.

In one sense, Lipinski has already been doing that. CBS 2 Chicago reporter Mike Flannery says that, even before her promotion, "we knew she was running the paper anyway. Now the organizational chart has caught up with reality."

But it's still a new reality: The entire newsroom is finally under her dominion—and new, grander expectations are on her shoulders.

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

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