Act Like You've Been Here Before

I was vacationing in Nashville last month when I received an email from Jeremy Owens, the charming and immensely talented producer of the storytelling series, You're Being Ridiculous, inviting me to read at his most recent group of shows with the theme, "light bulb." (Tickets are still available for the Dec. 2 at Uncommon Ground Edgewater.)

I was well into a draft about a different subject — one I'll eventually finish — when Joe Ricketts abruptly shut down the DNAInfo and Gothamist networks (which included Chicagoist) on Nov. 2. So I called an audible and wrote a story for YBR about how Chicagoist grew into the site it became and what it personally meant to me. If it weren't for the doors that Chicagoist opened, I would still be a surly bartender even closer to death than I currently am.

This one is for everyone who wrote for Chicagoist over its history. For another take, my friend and onetime colleague Jim Kopeny has his reflections on his personal blog.

________________________________________________________________

L-R: Some of the first wave of Chicagoist staffers: Julene McCoy, yours truly, Justin Sondak, Rachelle Bowden, Shannon Saar, Erin Shea Smith, Scott Smith, Mike Fourcher, Margaret Lyons, Kevin Robinson and Matt Wood, pictured at Gold Star before Chicagoist's 10-year anniversary party in October 2014 (Photo credit: Rachelle Bowden)

Chicagoist existed for thirteen years before Joe Ricketts shut it down a few weeks back. I was there for almost a decade, from its earliest days as a site finding its way to its final iteration as one of the most popular websites in the city. Even though my time at Chicagoist ended over two years ago, people say the same thing whenever my name turns the gears in their minds.

“What a fun job that must have been!”

And it was, but not in that cliched “if you love what you do for a living, it isn’t work” way, because there were days where I wanted to toss my laptop out the window, make a hobo roll and hop on a freight train out of town with my dog. What kept me sane at Chicagoist was one steadfast rule we observed throughout its lifespan: “Act like you’ve been here before.”

That rule and its corollary “fake it ‘til you make it” was what drove the site, especially in the early days of online journalism as a new, wild frontier. When Chicagoist launched in 2004, the concept of blogging was in its infancy. Gawker was only a year old, Huffington Post didn’t exist and Arianna Huffington was still a fucking Republican. Print journalism was relatively healthy: The Tribune and Sun-Times were thick with news and advertising, the Reader was the size of a cinder block and home to 15,000-word cover stories, but few in the print world recognized the threat the internet posed to newsrooms and how Craigslist would completely disrupt the advertising revenue model that was the lifeblood of newspapers. 

Few of the Chicagoist OGs had actual journalism experience when the site launched but we had moxie, a willingness to create our own thing and learn from our mistakes. The first wave of blogs took the news of the day, repackaged it with liberal doses of opinion and sarcasm and added context the original stories missed, hit “publish” and found an audience who understood the language we used to communicate.

We were wedding crashers, essentially. We showed up at a random reception hoping to down a few cocktails before getting kicked out and the next thing we knew, we’re leading a conga line with the bride and her blitzed father is trying to hook us up with his other daughter.

Another aspect to the “act like you’ve been here before” ethos was focusing our passions through our writing — we wrote about topics and subjects we couldn’t find in the dailies and weeklies. We brought aboard writers deeply involved in community organizing, political and social justice campaigns who taught our readers what it meant to give a shit about this city and its communities, and do the real, hard critical work it takes to inform themselves and others. We accepted writers who had deep connections to Chicago’s music, arts and culture scenes and could write about it with authority. We brought food writers into the fold who got creative covering the depth of Chicago’s food and drink scene on a non-existent budget while avoiding “pay for play” coverage. We had writers who taught readers and our fellow staff that a whole city and culture existed away from the North Side that can be explored without fear. As we informed our growing readership we also learned from each other, and formed a sense of teamwork, if not family.

A Chicagoist staff "Happy Hour" at Piece Pizza, some time in 2006. (Photo credit: Rachelle Bowden)

We took chances with our writing. We peppered articles with in-jokes that our most loyal readers understood. We had an “Ask Chicagoist” column that predated WBEZ’s “Curious City.” We had a podcast. We taught readers how to cure bacon inside a kitchen sink vanity and gave the process the very unappetizing term "sink meat." We criticized why City Council would rush to ban foie gras but took half measures legalizing food trucks. We clued readers to the existence of a marital aid called a “fucksaw.” We ran an April Fool’s Day article about a lost South Side neighborhood called “Little Hawaii” with doctored images so convincing, readers emailed us to learn more about this fictional neighborhood. We used publicly available crime statistics to map out Chicago’s douchiest nightlife districts. 

An empirical map of Chicago's douche vortices. (Map credit: Melissa McEwen)

We had a love-hate relationship with Billy Corgan and Steve Albini, regularly called out the Tribune’s John Kass on his Kassholishness, discovered that no amount of marijuana can mellow the easily triggered fans of Umprhey’s McGee, and stumbled into an online slap fight with Richard Marx, who assumed that all bloggers were in their mid-30s and lived in their parents’ basements. And we introduced millennials to the photography and writing of Art Shay, arguably America’s greatest living photojournalist. He wrote a weekly column for Chicagoist for three years and never missed a deadline, even as his wife of 60 years was slowly dying from cancer, which taught the staff, by example, the value of acting like a professional when my persistent reminders could not.

In acting like we’ve been here before, we hit upon a foolproof formula.

But there was another ingredient to that formula: we ran lean. By “lean,” I mean that no one was paid for the first couple years and I don’t feel that any of us who ultimately did make a living there earned what we felt our labor was worth. Chicagoist’s first paid full-time editor was hired nearly three years into its existence, and the beat editors were paid monthly stipends that may have covered the tab at one of our monthly staff boozefests (depending on how thirsty we were). I internalized the guilt whenever I told prospective staff that they would write for exposure, because I knew exposure doesn’t pay the bills.

In spite of that, Chicagoist had a queue of people interested in joining the site whenever calls for new writers went out because they recognized their work would reach a wide audience, and we editors worked hard to nurture their talents and instill a sense of professionalism so that the “exposure” could lead to better things, whether there or somewhere else.

One of the best Photoshops I even saw: Hawaiian emigres to Chicago kayaking in the shadows of U.S. Steel's South Works plant. (Image credit: Steven Pate)

By the time I became editor-in-chief in 2010, Chicagoist was a bullet train that constantly needed fuel to maintain top speed. Full-time editors had daily post quotas to hit — we called it “feeding the beast” — but being responsible for writing the majority of the stories on the site and managing a staff of editors and writers with day jobs was a stress for which I wasn’t completely prepared. As the only full-time editor for my first 18 months, I put in 12-16 hour days to feed the beast. It wreaked havoc with my personal life and my life-work balance. The long work days were a pattern I couldn’t completely shake, even as we added a full-time associate editor and brought on more staff to broaden our coverage. By the end of Year Three, I was burned out, increasingly detached from the tribe we worked so hard to develop and my work relationships with my bosses in New York, and my associate editors here, deteriorated. When I was finally fired two years ago, it came as no surprise and a great relief.

I moved on. I got a new job where I could work on the skills I allowed to atrophy while feeding the beast, and became part of another eager band of reporters that nurtures and encourages me to constantly improve as a journalist. And the work is paying off again. I feel as though I’m producing some of the best work of my career.

A part of the healing process was completely disconnecting myself from Chicagoist, which was necessary for me to figure out what I was without it, and to allow the staff to build on the existing foundation. One of the lessons I learned was that being an editor is like being a renter. You can arrange the furniture to your liking, hang photos and artwork on the walls, paint rooms and make minor repairs. But if the landlord chooses not to renew the lease, you’re out. I didn’t get to say goodbye to the staff I helped build and nurture in the way I wanted.

Joe Ricketts’ decision to shut down Chicagoist and DNAInfo Chicago was equivalent to him kicking everyone out of his guest house, and during the holidays, to boot. Having some distance from Chicagoist, I can look back at it fondly: the friendships that will stand the test of time, the unlikely relationships that turned into marriages, the staff that went on to bigger and better things in journalism and other corners of media, and the ones who took their experiences and created completely new things. And I can hold my head high knowing I played a role, however small.

A couple weeks back, a handful of us gathered at the home of our arts editor. We traded war stories and caught up on life and didn’t talk too much about the billionaire elephant in the room. We toasted the good times and what was left behind and the lives we hopefully enriched with our work.

We acted like we’ve been here before. Because we had.

I had this banner made for a fundraiser Sam Abernethy organized at Nisei Lounge in 2013. It finally made it back to my possession. (Photo credit: Chuck Sudo)