 . . . Fall 1997
I met the 41-year-old Lipinski on a June morning in her office on the fourth floor of the Tribune Tower in Chicago, overlooking Michigan Avenue. I noticed her seemingly unconscious, pencil-playing habit right away. She doesn’t seem to fiddle with pencils because she’s nervous. It’s more like the writing instruments are an extension of her.
"I remember the day my parents drove me to Ann Arbor in 1974. I quickly dumped my stuff in my dorm room at South Quad and I didn’t even unpack. I immediately walked over to the Daily." But the newspaper hadn’t started up yet for the year. She had to wait a week for the beginning meeting.
"I remember walking in that day and there was this crowd of new recruits. And [senior editor] Dan Biddle was standing on top of the wooden countertop that runs around the newsroom. He had a nickel Coke in his hand. I just thought I had gone to heaven."
Lipinski stuck around after the meeting to get her first assignment. "I remember Dan sitting down at a manual typewriter and pecking away with a couple of fingers a couple assignments for me."
She started as a telegraph editor—a fancy title for someone who stood by the telegraph machine with a ruler, ripped stories off the machine and set them in neat stacks on the newsdesk for the senior editor—and moved up the ranks to the Ann Arbor politics beat. "I learned things on that beat I’m sure I still use on the job today. Things that are just so internalized about politics and government." It was also that job that took her to the 1976 Democratic Convention in New York City where Jimmy Carter was nominated.
The Daily couldn’t fund the trip, so "it was me and a Daily photographer in his old beat-up white Chevy that was as big as a house, driving out to New York. We stayed with his grandmother in Forest Hills, slept on the floor and took the subway to cover the convention every day"—she paused to laugh—"and he turned out to be my husband." His name is Steve Kagan, and he was one year ahead of Lipinski. "I thought he was nice looking and sweet. He was maybe a little shy."
It wasn’t an overnight love story, but you could say Jimmy Carter brought them together. One day Steve and Ann Marie were headed to Detroit Metro Airport to cover Carter’s arrival in Michigan. "Jimmy Carter is really the significant person in this; he may have screwed a lot of things up, but he got this right," she said, laughing, and then continued. "I was in a lousy mood, and on the drive out Steve was so sweet and solicitous without being overly so. And I thought, what a great guy. Mostly we didn’t say anything." Lipinski still has the tattered green-and-white press pass she used to cover that Carter event. She keeps it in her car. She and Kagan married in 1981. He is now a freelance photographer and frequent contributor to People and the New York Times. They have a daughter.
The summer before her senior year, Lipinski went to Chicago as a Tribune intern. The woman who hired her said that she hated bringing seniors in for internships because they always wanted jobs, that if that was Lipinski’s desire, she should reconsider. But Lipinski, who already had a job offer from the Miami Herald, became "the intern who never left."
When Lipinski began her internship in 1978, she had just one credit to finish to ger her bachelor’s degree and planned to get it that summer. When the Trib hired her as a feature reporter, however, her work interrupted her schooling, and she didn’t complete her credits and get her degree until 1996. No one has held the delay against her.
After that she became part of the paper’s three-person investigative reporting team. It was as part of that team that the 32-year-old Lipinski won a 1988 Pulitzer Prize for a 10-month investigative series on corruption in the Chicago City Council. The story documented corruption ranging from zoning and licensing problems to petty perks. The essence of the story was how perverted the system of government had become in Chicago and how many aldermen were using their public office for personal gain.
On a fast track to management, Lipinski became managing editor of news in February 1995; by the end of the year she was managing editor of the whole paper. So now that she rewrites other people’s stories, does the intrepid reporter miss seeing her own byline in the paper? "No. I have the same sensation I had when the story was my own. The satisfactions may be different but they are equal. And as I got more responsibility in this job, I realized it’s also thrilling not just to work with a reporter to craft a story but also to work with the photographers and graphic artists and other editors and designers. To have this great symphony orchestra and, on our best days, to conduct it, making beautiful music and making the paper really click. It feels good."
At 41, Lipinski is the youngest managing editor the paper has ever had. So what’s next? "I never wanted or thought or planned to be an editor, and I never thought of being managing editor, although it has turned out to be a great thrill. I’ve never planned my career in terms of what’s the next job. I tend to think more in terms of stories and personal development, and making the newspaper better. There are a lot of ways I can do that. And that’s been good. I’ve tended more to think about the next story. I was on my way to Florida. This was not where I thought I would end up. I’m the accidental Trib employee."
She couldn’t have written a better story if she had tried.
Texas-based writer Jennifer Silverberg ’95 was a reporter for the Michigan Daily and is now a frequent contributor to the Michigan Alumnus and other publications.
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"I’m notorious for pencil wearing. I always have a pencil in my hair. I don’t even realize I’m doing it. There have been times when I go to the bathroom and look in the mirror and I have four of them stuck in my hair," she said. "I love what they are. I love what they do."
The editor of her high school newspaper in Trenton, Michigan, she enrolled at Michigan State but then decided at the last minute to switch to Michigan. "I can’t even tell you why. I just remember one night sitting and thinking, ‘I think I’ve made a mistake.’ It was sort of late for that, but I remember going to my parents’ room and saying to my Dad, ‘I’ve changed my mind. I think I want to go to Ann Arbor.’" And that’s just what she did.
Lipinski became co-editor of the Daily in 1977-78, her senior year, with Jim Tobin, now a Detroit News reporter and author of a recent biography of World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle. "My four years in Ann Arbor were so completely formative on every front. It helped shape my career and my personal life. It’s huge; it’s just an enormous school. But the thing that’s great about it is there are all these niches and little villages people create for themselves in the midst of this big forest. And whether that’s The Michigan Daily for you or the school radio or a fraternity or sorority, there are all these places where people carve out these small families or support systems for themselves. Someone can get to Michigan and really get the sense that they can learn anything there. That they can be anything there."