In the mid-1990s a research-minded class of e-commerce websites was incubated in Chicago's Gothic Tribune Tower.
We all lead by design. My first Chicago Tribune web project taught me about leadership styles and the value of a team.
In 1997 I started working in a cramped suite on an upper floor of Tribune Tower. Desks were pushed together to hold boxy computer monitors, and the worn linoleum floor tiles showed cement below. Not much different from my old spot on the Chicago Sun-Times copy desk, but now I was building websites for the Chicago Tribune.
None of us in the room had built much more than a home page before, but months earlier our publisher Owen Youngman had launched chicago.tribune.com. (It took another year for Tribune to buy the chicagotribune.com domain—tribune.com was just fine for the whole chain, thank you.) I'd quit the Sun-Times business section. Building websites seemed more interesting than writing about them.
We were a roomful of hyphenates. Mike DiGioia, the art director, was a zine editor and Cuba tourist. Brian Neale our automotive expert, was a sportswriter who rode his motorcycle to the Tower. Ernesto Perez was a designer-DJ, Elise Bittner a travel writer-chef, Jayne Lilienfeld an ecologist-sculptor, Marilia Gutierrez a reporter-interpreter.
Editor Bill Swislow had published a Tribune business digest via the new medium of fax machine, and a personal home page with cultural critiques of Nancy and Sluggo comics. He dabbled in outsider art, and kept Martin Denny LPs propped up against his desk lamp just for the kitsch of it. All of us had multiple interests, a good plan if you're not sure exactly what skills you'll eventually need.
New media, new rules
This team taught me more about leadership than when I was bossing around reporters. Though I was an officer in my professional society, I hadn't seen myself as a leader. Bosses had tough names and tough reputations. Ken Lay. Mike Ditka. Chainsaw Al Dunlap. Neutron Jack Welch. The Sun-Times newsroom was full of gruff J. Jonah Jameson types to my neurotic Peter Parker. On the business beat, corporate chieftains were losers if they weren't following Welch's lead and firing 10% of their staff as slackers.
There's more than one way to lead, though, and the internet was here to school us. Youngman admitted he didn't have all the answers. "Every day I'm going to make a wrong decision," Youngman would say. "No one knows what will prove to be right. Still, if I don't make decisions I'll miss opportunities." Although surfing the web put Youngman in rough waters, he had started new sections of the Tribune, and was convinced that the internet was more than a fad. His enthusiasm for an unproven medium made him a persuasive leader.
