The Deal from Hell

by James O'Shea

  I had formed an alliance with Lipinski when Fuller tapped her to run the metro desk, the heart of the newspaper where seasoned journalists break news and newcomers break in. Lipinski had hundreds of journalists on her staff, and she used them to flood the zone on a local story, overwhelming the competition by tossing more and better resources at a story than anyone else. She was a tough, aggressive, and smart editor who zealously protected her newsroom against outside interference or influence.

  A newspaper has a range of editors that do a wide variety of jobs. But the overall responsibility is to sift through the vast array of stories and reports about events from throughout the world and pare them down to those that should go into the newspaper every day. On a slow news day, a story about the mayor in Chicago could be the page one headline. A day later, the same story might not even make it in the newspaper because a crush of significant news from elsewhere in the world could simply overwhelm it. The editor and managing editor oversee the process and also set the level of excellence the paper demands from its staff. Lipinski set the bar high:For better or worse, I tried to create a safe space in the newsroom where reporters could dream big. . . . I remember once President Clinton had taken a trip and broke some big news, and we didn’t have our own story. This was before we bought Times Mirror. When I asked why, someone told me the reporter knew we were having budget problems in the newsroom and had decided not to go on the trip to save money. That was the first time I saw budget challenges creeping into reporters’ decision-making and it concerned me. I wanted my reporters to be coming to me with big ideas about the Human Genome Project, or investigating how people get sick and die on airplanes, and I couldn’t have them not pitching ideas because they were caught up in worrying about budget cuts or a job that didn’t get filled. It was their job to find those ideas and my job to figure out if or how to fund that ambition. Right or wrong, I didn’t want my reporters worrying about that. That’s what I got paid to do. They were supposed to worry about stories.

  As the editor in charge of foreign and national news, I supervised the “A” section and the coveted space on page one and had far more travel money than anyone else. So Lipinski and I had formed a partnership: When I needed an extra reporter to cover a big story or when I wanted to hire someone, she would lend me a reporter or consider my job applicant for a spot on metro, where there were always far more job openings. When she needed travel money to send one of her reporters on a trip for a story, I’d free up some dollars from my budget and make space in the “A” section for the story, even if it meant holding a story written by one of the correspondents on the national or foreign staff. The deals led to a partnership of mutual trust and respect that would survive the incredible ordeals we would face as leaders in an industry in upheaval.

  Luckily for us, in early 2000, the Tribune had as much financial as journalistic muscle. Thanks to revenues gushing in from its papers and broadcast properties, Tribune Company had ample resources when it acquired Times Mirror and remained in fairly good financial shape. The Chicago paper had always guarded its local markets from penetration from competitors, too, and had built a strong stream of non-newspaper revenues. Tribune Company made $650 million in profit on revenues of $5.3 billion the first year after the deal, a margin of only 12.3 percent, primarily because the adverse effects of September 11, 2001, hurt the bottom line. By 2002, Tribune Company resumed posting the 20 percent plus margins it had delivered every year since 1996. The Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, posted margins of 14 or 15 percent.

  In the newsroom, we put that money to good work bringing Tribune readers signature coverage they couldn’t get elsewhere from reporters like John Crewdson, who convinced Lipinski and me to let him investigate how more people die of illness on planes than in crashes. When we reacted skeptically to his pitch, Crewdson fought back, arguing that sketchy statistics from the airline industry and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) purposely diminished the problem; airlines didn’t want anyone to know their planes lacked basic emergency medical equipment or that their staffs didn’t have proper emergency medical training. The airlines, including Chicagobased United, were loath to even discuss the situation, a stance that made Crewdson more determined to unearth the story.

  Once we gave the project a green light, Crewdson, a bear of a man and a brilliant reporter, traveled the country to report and write “Code Blue.” He filed Freedom of Information Act requests that generated documents exposing widespread discrepancies between FAA records involving in-flight illness reports and those on the airlines’ own computers or in FAA records on emergency landings. He scrutinized coroner reports from counties in which airports were located to show how airlines avoided reporting an in-flight death by getting the body off the plane so the medical examiner would pronounce the passenger dead in the airport or on the jet bridge.

  Readers of means and advertisers occasionally pressured us to back off a story or remove a journalist they found overly aggressive. But we absorbed that pressure. Crewdson later proposed we investigate child charities, the kind that ask you to send a small amount of money to sponsor some doe-faced child in an impoverished country where a dollar is a dowry. He might as well have proposed a hit job on Bambi. Organizations like Save the Children Federation helped kids. They were considered good guys. Their boards were loaded with influential folks who wouldn’t hesitate to use their muscle against some nosy reporter. But the organizations that Crewdson singled out had collected $850 million in donations over the prior four years, and Crewdson questioned whether the money really got to the kids or did any good. So we recruited Lisa Anderson, who had become a national correspondent, Michael Tackett, from the Washington Bureau, and several other Tribune reporters to sponsor twelve kids with four charities—Save the Children, Childreach, the Christian Children’s Fund, and Children International. The reporters used their own names as sponsors and sent in contributions, usually about $20 a month, for two years, sponsoring kids in some of the world’s most remote places. The charities sent our reporter-donors heart-tugging pictures of their children with feel-good narratives spelling out how so little out of their pockets did so much good.

  In May 1997, the sponsoring journalists fanned out across the globe on a journey to unearth their sponsored kids in the series we later named “The Miracle Merchants.” Searching for Anderson’s sponsored child, Korotoumou Kone, Anderson, photographer José Moré, and Tribune’s Africa correspondent Hugh Dellios creaked along in a battered Peugeot until a narrow ribbon of rutted, red clay no wider than a goat path turned into scrub as they traversed N’goufien, the rural Malian village Korotoumou called home. Korotoumou Kone, the reporters soon learned, had been struck by lightning four months after Anderson had started sending her money. She had been dead almost the entire time that Anderson had sponsored her through Save the Children.

  We contacted the charity to get its side of the story. Of course, not all sponsored children were dead, and money from sponsors at all four charities did flow to impoverished villages, but our reporting documented significant examples of misuse and waste. Members of the charities’ boards called pleading with me to “take it easy” on them. Dr. Bob Arnot, the physician who regularly appeared on national television and a member of Save the Children’s board, demanded why I was persecuting the good guys. Tom Murphy, the head of Capital Cities Communications, which owned ABC News, flew to Chicago to complain about the investigation to Tribune publisher Scott Smith, who provided a sympathetic ear and also a sobering reaction, quoting the line from Flannery O’Connor that graced an inner wall of the Tribune Tower: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

  Our reporting exposed how charities received little independent scrutiny. Save the Children attacked our reporters as unethical and our story as slanted. One charity, Children International, not only refused to talk to us on the record, but also accused a Tribune reporter of bribing a source because he had bought a mattress for a child while he was visiting the village
where the child lived. Eventually, Children International hired John Walsh, a high-powered New York attorney and expert at crafting threatening letters, including one he wrote to Madigan on the eve of the series, leveling accusations of misconduct against Tribune reporters and threatening a suit that would bring down Tribune Company. We published the series nonetheless, and Walsh never sued.

  Though our colleagues on the East and West coasts may have overlooked our work, the Tribune’s journalism had impact. The newspaper’s criminal justice reporting literally transformed the debate over the death penalty and focused much attention on whether a poor black man in Chicago had a better chance of being executed than a poor white person who could afford a lawyer who didn’t doze off during a trial. After Crewdson’s airline coverage, President Clinton signed the Aviation Medical Assistance Act, which required some thirty domestic airlines to begin reporting passenger medical emergencies to the FAA, which now requires all U.S. airlines to carry defibrillators on airplanes. Years after Anderson told Tribune readers about Korotoumou Kone, a group of child sponsorship charities, including Save the Children, announced they would pursue and adopt meaningful certification standards to quell fears of funding abuses. In announcing the effort, officials from the charity world said the Tribune series jarred the industry into action. “The Tribune affair was a wake-up call for a lot of us,” Jeffrey Brown, director of sponsorship programming for World Vision U.S., told the Wall Street Journal. “Even though we may be doing things the way they should be done, if others don’t, it reflects poorly on us because people assume agencies are similar in their practices.”

  Some critics, including people in the Tribune’s newsroom, accused us of pursuing projects like “Trial and Error,” “Code Blue,” and “The Miracle Merchants” simply to impress other journalists by winning Pulitzers. I loved to see my reporters’ work recognized by their peers for a job well done, but we didn’t do any of those projects for a Pulitzer. We did them because we were the Chicago Tribune, and this was the kind of journalism that Lipinski’s Tribune practiced, whether we were in Bamako or Barrington, South Africa or the South Side. We took on the criminal justice system, the airlines, and the charities because that’s what journalists are supposed to do: Give voice to those without a megaphone, shine a light on society’s darkest corners where injustice or corruption often lurks in the shadows.

  Not everyone agreed with the mission. Newsrooms are complex places full of ego-driven people motivated by a lot more than money. True journalists become journalists because of their love of a story well told, and because they want to make a difference. The Tribune’s newsroom was home to reporters who resented Lipinski, me, and my trusted cadre of editors and reporters. They viewed editors like me as arrogant elitists who doled out opportunities to friends—“journalistas” clinging to a prudish, outdated model of newspapering that failed to appeal to readers who wanted to know about popular culture, not political strife. There’s probably some truth to that, although I would have had more respect for newsroom critics had they confronted me face-to-face instead of in anonymous comments posted on the blogs that began to pollute the news atmosphere.

  In creating a special place in the newsroom where reporters could dream big, we also created a cocoon that protected journalists from problems that would hurt our newspaper and industry. Right or wrong, Lipinski and I felt a newspaper had to be a community leader, a force that challenged its community to confront issues that probably wouldn’t score high on some readership marketing survey. Our job was to tell stories as well and as thoroughly as we could, and if we succeeded, we would create the kind of audience that advertisers wanted to reach. As Fuller said in his book, the backbone of a newsroom had to be good journalistic values—ones that readers would respect even if the stories generated angered everyone.

  The criminal justice, airline, and children’s coverage never won a Pulitzer, but the brand of journalism these stories represented paid huge dividends in other ways. The Tribune developed a reputation that drew more high-quality journalists to its ranks, helping make up in quality what we lacked in quantity. One such writer was Paul Salopek, a one-of-a-kind individual who reported like a demon, wrote like a poet, and garnered the Tribune two Pulitzers for his well-reported stories.

  Salopek was a rare breed. He took Tribune readers (and Tribune photographer José Moré) to rivers of blood in the war-torn Congo when the country was off-limits to journalists. He rode donkeys to get a story, piloted down the treacherous Congo River in a canoe. Nothing stopped him, not the Hindu Kush Mountains in Afghanistan, not death threats or a turn in an African prison. He walked, ran, crawled, and scraped to produce riveting journalism that rewarded Tribune readers with his incredible eye for detail that made stories spring to life, sometimes by poetic portrayals of death. In Hillah, Iraq, he filed a report on the victims of Saddam Hussein:The dead are rising up in Iraq. They are emerging from bald soccer fields as well as bleak prison yards. They are rising from innocent looking highway medians and jaunty carnival grounds. False teeth, clumps of women’s black hair. The twig like rib cages of babies. The appearance of such heartbreaking relics represents the final, damning rebellion against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—an intifada of bones.

  Salopek later explained:What I liked about the Tribune was that it was a big metro daily with a foreign staff and a respectably-sized national staff . . . where reporters seemed to be able to develop an individual voice, . . . not the kind of uniprose you find at so many other big papers. I was hired in metro as a general assignment reporter. I knew nothing about the Midwest. I had never been to Chicago. But I quickly discovered that editors on metro would give you lots of opportunities. You could go to them with four or five good ideas and they would say “yes” to them. It was an idea meritocracy. If you had a great idea, they were willing to give you a shot at making it real. And that was really unusual for someone coming from an international magazine [National Geographic ] that had such a rigorous process to get an idea approved because it was always so expensive.... The paper had an enterprise culture. It didn’t have the resources of a lot of the bigger metro dailies, but it had this enterprise culture that I found so appealing.

  I don’t think Salopek would have survived, much less thrived at any other newspaper, but the atmosphere at the Tribune was more level and perhaps more entrepreneurial than most. We were willing to go out on limbs for our writers. When Salopek requested a yearlong leave from the paper to ride a donkey 2,000 miles from the Arizona border to a small town in Mexico, we agreed.

  Salopek converted his passion for storytelling into powerful journalism on subjects as complex as the Human Genome Project, or dreaded diseases like Ebola, Africa’s notoriously lethal virus.

  Writers like Crewdson, Anderson, and Salopek found a home at the Tribune. We encouraged our writers to fight for stories they considered important, and we trusted them enough to send them on missions at which other papers might well have scoffed. With a slimmer staff, our physical resources were limited, but we believed in deep coverage when we landed on a story that sparked our collective interest. Importantly, we were not easily cowed.

  Not every journalist at the Chicago Tribune, of course, was as principled, smart, or precise as Anderson, Crewdson, or Salopek. Journalists usually don’t get into trouble trafficking in money, the currency that corrupts other businesses. The mistakes that embarrass journalists and their craft usually involve ego—a quest for fame or status. The journalists at the Tribune were no different from those at any other paper in that regard. In our quest for recognition or breaking the big story, we sometimes screwed up badly.

  In one effort to beat the competition, we ran a story and headline that announced that Vito Marzullo, a notorious local gangster, had died. The next morning, his family informed us otherwise. Another time, in April 2005, Lipinski called me, sick about back-to-back errors that would embarrass the Tribune and cost it some money. A Tribune reader had recently opened up his paper to find his picture in a graphic e
ntitled “Infrastructure of a Chicago Mob.” The man was a legitimate Chicago businessman who happened to have the same name as the gangster who was in jail. The very next day, we ran a similarly erroneous report. The paper featured a photograph of Joey “The Clown” Lombardo, a hoodlum who had been the subject of a lengthy and unsuccessful FBI manhunt. In an effort to mock the FBI, the headline above the photo read, “Have You Seen This Clown?” The man pictured was not Lombardo.

  Such outright mistakes make good stories today when reporters and editors gather over drinks. But they were decidedly unfunny at the time: Our sloppy journalism embarrassed the paper and cast in doubt the Tribune’s credibility and reputation for getting things right. Eventually the paper reached financial settlements with the wronged parties.

  Sometimes we made bad judgments—ones that were costly in other ways. In 2005, we started Redeye, a paper designed to appeal to younger readers. Almost everyone agreed that the standards by which we judged news for Redeye would be different than those we used to assess content for the Chicago Tribune’s older audience. We told editors to consider pushing the envelope for Redeye content. The change in philosophy affected the more staid Tribune too, to ill-effect.

  Geoffrey Brown, the Tribune editor who oversaw Woman News, a Tribune section that ran midweek, authorized a front-page story of Woman News that examined the increasingly acceptable use of the word cunt. The section itself was controversial enough; many women felt the name Woman News was sexist. Complicating matters, I didn’t get wind of the story until it had been printed. In a panic, I called a production editor who assured me that the section had not yet been inserted into the paper.