How many editors does it take to change a light bulb? The answer, given by the Pulitzer-Prize winning editor of the Chicago Tribune, is three.
“One to change the bulb, and two to talk about how great the old bulb was.”
Speaking at the 30th annual Ruhl Lecture, Ann Marie Lipinski, also senior vice president for the paper, shared with nearly 200 people anecdotes about the struggling news industry, lamentations from former editors that newspapers aren’t as good as in the past and visions for a hopeful future.
Because of the Internet, news is readily available and free, but readership of newspapers is suffering, Lipinski said. Newspapers are now faced with a major transition to attract readers while continuing to entertain, inform and please readers, she said. But despite a dwindling readership, Lipinski said she remains optimistic because a sovereign nation “only works if people are informed” and keeping people informed requires that somebody gathers and reports the facts. “Information wants to be free,” she said, but journalists know more than anyone that unveiling a scandal in Washington or a genocide in Darfur isn’t free.
“You can’t just sit on your laptop and figure out what’s going on in Iraq,” she said.
Her speech, “Heartland Ethics: Learning values at the ironing board,” refers to the beginning of Lipinski’s journalism career when she learned to interview her grandmother “Granny Annie” as she stood behind her lectern – an ironing board.
It was in front of this lectern that Lipinski learned about ethics as Granny Annie intertwined the mundane details of daily life with the extraordinary, a necessary balance in presenting the truth, Lipinski said.
As a staff member at The Michigan Daily, the student paper at the University of Michigan, Lipinski said she remembered sacrificing the subsidized soda machine and the subscription to the daily wire service to combat a changing industry. The latter, she said, was made with the understanding that “it would be restored if it was needed to serve the readers – the readers.”
Some of the transitions at the Chicago Tribune include the usual reductions in staff and cutting the daily stock tables, along with other “out with the old, in with the new” type of adaptations, Lipinski said after the event. The paper has also begun publishing a daily tabloid called RedEye directed at youth who make roughly 24-minute commutes daily. While many consider the tabloid a dumbed-down version of the Chicago Tribune, Lipinski said, the digested version actually draws in new readers and often attracts them to the regular paper.
Adaptation is necessary in this transition period, she said, and criticisms from lamenting former editors aren’t completely accurate. Singling out many of this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners and noting the coverage of the Darfur genocide, Hurricane Katrina disaster and domestic eavesdropping investigations, Lipinski rhetorically asked the crowd, “which can be left out?”
“I see no shortage of courage in our nation’s newsroom,” she said.
Journalism in college wasn’t just about sitting on countertops, talking about staffers’ love lives and writing sports puns about the University of Michigan Wolverines beating the U.S. Naval Academy “seamen.”
“Nothing about those days seemed like playing journalist,” she said, explaining that the experiences at her college newspaper, such as encountering plagiarism, stayed with her as she began her professional career.
Years ago, Lipinski reread a stack of letters that past editors had written to their predecessors. Much of the advice was practical; some of it was philosophical. She said she could only quote one sentence verbatim.
“It said, ‘Take care of your dailies,’” she said.