The 1988 Pulitzer Prize winning journalist of the Chicago Tribune speaks on the ethics and the economics of American journalism in the 21st Century

On Thurs. 25th May, Ann Marie Lipinski, the senior vice president and Editor of the Chicago Tribune, covered many pertinent areas concerning American journalism in the 21st Century at the 2006 Ruhl Lecture hosted by the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication. She spoke to an audience of 222 people in the Ballroom of the Erb Memorial Union building of the Tribune’s role in ending capital punishment in Illinois, the issue and impact of plagiarism in journalism from a practitioner’s viewpoint and the lessons she learned from her grandmother ironing while General Hospital is on television.

Before an audience of college students majoring in journalism and the faculty of the School of Journalism and Communication, Lipinski recalled her first experience with plagiarism by a co-worker when she was a student journalist at The Michigan Daily, the University of Michigan’s student newspaper.

“I remembered three things,” she said. “The sobriety of the editors who examined the claims and made the decision to let go their fellow student; the sadness that enveloped our small newsroom for the deception that had been visited upon us and our readers; and, finally, the heartache we all felt for our fallen colleague, who surely was wrong but was still a human being.”

She witnessed the destruction reaped by a single act of plagiarism on a friend’s possible career in professional journalism before it has even begun. As an editor, she has sat in judgment of a co-worker suspected of plagiarism and faced the difficult decisions that followed. Editors have a duty to the reading public to enforce the ethical standards of a newspaper on their journalists, who they sometimes call friends. In her speech, she never once discussed the difficulties facing a newspaper after such an incident to regaining the trust of its reading public.

She also discussed the business pressures and the economic changes facing American journalism today. Wall Street and investors today expect companies to increase profits quarter over quarter, year over year.

“The familiar gale winds buffeting the economy are at our doorstep, and knocking,” she said. Newspapers across America face a financial death spiral. Advertisers want the biggest bang for their buck and newspapers today have a declining circulation. Naturally, advertisers have taken their business elsewhere, like television and the Internet. Both Yahoo! and Google enjoy enormous advertising dollars because of the reach of their search engines to the Web-surfing public. Perhaps it is not surprising that, given the declining profitability of newspapers, the investing public has become disenchanted and disillusioned with the industry.

She conceded that the industry as a whole yet to formulate a policy to survive in the Internet age. Some newspapers like the Wall Street Journal charge users a fee to read its online edition, while many others merely give away for free. She finds the notion of information wanting to be free economically to be journalistically troubling, given the sheer cost of gathering the information. She said that in her office hangs a picture of a Chicago Tribune journalist and a photographer working on a story about the North Alliance of Afghanistan on a laptop computer powered by a gas generator in a room lit by a kerosene lamp on a cold dark night.

“You can’t Photoshop that,” she said.