Ann Marie Lipinski just finished giving her goodbye speech on the Tribune's fourth floor newsroom. Here's an on-the-scene description from a fellow Retcher:
The newsroom was crowded with staffers, editors, reporters, photogs, designers, all editorial departments, as Lipinski spoke at about 6 p.m. Chicago time.
She began by saying she'd received a lot of e-mails about her departure, but there was one in particular she wanted to share. She had blown it up and pasted it to a piece of cardboard. It said: "You C_nt Leave."
(The quote is a reference to a features story that she killed post-press run because it featured a headline that read: "You c*nt say that." It was a legendary event here, because she had editors over at the plant literally pulling the section out of bundles.)(The Retch notes: Can you imagine Lee Abrams caring so much about language? Or its impact?)
A class act. Gerould W. Kern, Zell tool, now takes charge. The Retch is sorry to see yet another outstanding journalistic leader depart. Fuck you, Zell.Lipinski mentioned that her own daughter had told her that she needed a posse. "Thank you all for being my posse," she told the newsroom.
Some of her remarks:
"The newsroom is bigger than one man or one woman,'' she said. "Anything that I have achieved as an editor was because of you.""You have my back, and I have tried to have yours""I couldn't be more grateful and more proud."
She left the newsroom to applause
11 comments:
I met Anne Marie at the DC bureau some years back at their grand opening and she truly is a remarkable woman. You can tell she came up through the ranks and paid her professional dues.
Unlike that silver-spooned troll that ran TV operations there. Like some gutter-drunk, I picture her guzzling the little pricks kool-aid as we speak....
http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2008/07/17/talking-bylines-with-new-chicago-tribune-editor
Let's continue to blame Sam Zell for the fact that the newspaper business throughout the world has changed, and will never be the same.
We are all such SMART newsmen and women that we KNOW it would have NEVER happened, if not for Zell.
He makes such a perfect object on which to focus our anger, fear, denial and ignorance.
It's SO much more gratifying than actually doing something productive.
"WOW!! I saw the sky starten to darken and heard the rumble of thunder grow closer and closer over the past *****TWO YEARS*****(or more)and would you BELIEVE IT?!?!?!?..... It eventually began to RAIN!!!!!!!!"- A Tribune Co. newspaper employee, July 2008
Yeah, yeah, yeah. If she admire her for killing the story "The C*nt Say That" you're just encouraging the king of infantile prissiness that is helping to kill newspapers, which are written as if their readers are in convents. No wonder the Daily Show thrives.
... and cityonthemake continues his streak of pointless, ignorant posts filled with straw men.
it's clear that much of what is going on here is over your head. perhaps you'd be more comfortable at one of our lower-stakes tables.
AM Lipinski stayed too long and should have left back in May, if not earlier. Instead she stayed, did a "work slow down" and held up any forward movement in the redesign project. What a horrible way to leave and such a blatant disrespect to the newsroom staff.
Many staff members called her "disengaged."
point of clarification: the sign was a hand-made card from a features reporter, not an e-mail from a reader.
I was one of those ink-stained Tribune editors pulling the "C*nt" Woman News sections out by hand. And I still find myself of two minds over Lipinski's departure. On one hand, she cared about our newspaper's journalistic principals and her staff -- and it seems clear that kind of commitment is on its way out. On the other, I can't overstress the chill that Woman News move put over the Trib newsroom. Want to take risks? Want to step out of the cautious comfort zone the paper inhabits day after day (and may eventually kill it off)? Here's your consequence. (Frankly she had no right to make a joke out of, even years later, even at her departure.)
"Instead she stayed, did a "work slow down" and held up any forward movement in the redesign project."
Excellent! Anyone who interferes with one of these crazy redesign effort is all right in my book.
Sam Zell isn't the cause....
He's the effect.
Smart people GET that.
Angry simpletons blame Zell.
If it wasn't Zell, it would have been______________(name of opportunist here).
Fortunately, for us...my money, literally, is on Zell.
He presents us the best chance to squeak out of this thing with our scalps, shirts and nest eggs still attached.
If you don't know that about Sam....you're probably Monique Garcia or Melissa Patterson,(who have written TWO articles re: police chase/shooting that ended on the Ike) or any other hack that is such the consummate professional journalist.
Maybe one of you ACTUAL Chicagoans that work in the newsroom can explain to these two the difference between Garfield Park and Garfield Ridge..
lol...
:0(
As anyone who ever worked at The Tribune can attest, arrogance thrived there and with it a stubborn resistance to change, even the necessary kind. Tribune staffers, from top to bottom, were so taken with themselves that they lost sight of their newspaper and its mission. Envy, gossip, backbiting and a slew of other destructive preoccupations gnawed steadily at the place and progress was among the chief casualties. They didn't enact a decent ethics policy over there until Jim Squires (otherwise a mediocre editor) came along in the early 1980s. The staff fought a stubborn and mostly successful holding action to keep the paper's head mired in the inner city while the most prized readership was fleeing to the suburbs and fueling success at the Daily Herald and others. The paper missed the rise of Harold Washington and the fall of the public schools until both were well underway, thus establishing itself as a follower, not a leader. Tribune writers, often skating on the edge of racism in the heavily racist city, ridiculed Jesse Jackson as a buffoon even as he was rising as a national political figure and significant presidential candidate. Mike Royko was recruited from the Sun Times only to spend the rest of his years doing work far beneath his proven abilities. Bob Greene, a petty man with an oversized ego and a really bad toupée, was so resented and envied that he was eventually discarded for dubious reasons, his undeniable popularity among readers notwithstanding.
The Tribune was, in brief, a stupid newspaper shaped at all levels by stupid, mostly overpaid people who spent far too much time telling each other that they were wonderful.
It all added up to a long, painful path to decline and decay.
Perhaps new owners less married to the past and less rooted in the Tribune's dysfunctional culture, can yet save the once-proud newspaper, but I wouldn't bet the rent. Even innovative, forward-looking newspapers are struggling to reinvent themselves and for the most part are failing miserably. The way to go with the newspaper itself is to give up on the masses and aim squarely at the better-educated, more affluent readers, who can still be served up profitably to advertisers. The website, meanwhile, can become the medium for the younger, dumber generation, but not for free. With luck, some of the website users will eventually become addicted news junkies and embrace the print version as well, but there are no guarantees. Meanwhile, perhaps cable and broadcasting can become part of a coordinated mix of media that distribute the rich Tribune-produced content across multiple media. The future is not as a "newspaper" but rather as a "news COMPANY."
The first step, I think, is to bring in more new blood, meaning people who have actually seen the world outside of Chicago and know it to be round. To that end, dumping Lipinski and others with minds buried in the arrogance and isolation of the past is a necessary step in the right direction.
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