Chicago Tribune Interactive
1997 - 2012
Images
I was originally hired at the Tribune to be an online Ad Creator. This primarily entailed making 10k - 15k tiles (120x40) and banners (468x60) that would run throughout Chicago Tribune online properties like chicagotribune.com, metromix.com, and their classified sites. Occassionally I'd be assigned to make small one-to-five page microsites for some of these advertisers as well. It wasn't glamorous, but a good foot in the door. (A young, naive Craig thought the Tribune would be a good place to get my feet wet, stay a year or two and learn as much as I could for my next bigger and better job. I stayed there 15 years.)
I recall a few times going out on calls with salesmen, as at the time online ads were often seen as "value added" perks for advertisers that ran ads in the print Tribune. This was the thinking in those days by newspapers, and it was no wonder that they weren't prepared for what was coming in a few years.
One call in particular I went on with a sales rep was to Oberweis in Aurora. He wanted a microsite to pitch for them and I had a couple days to put it together. I really didn't have anything to work with, as back then we were lucky to get a business card to scan a logo or a restaurant menu to get a color palatte idea and that was it. So I went to an Oberweis on York Road just north of my Tribune Oakbrook office and bought a chocolate shake. After finishing the shake, I went back to the office, washed out the cup and started taking it apart to scan in their logo and some cow illustrations. I made something out of nothing to take along to the meeting.
The sales rep made his pitch and I basically sat in the room and listened. I remember they really weren't even sure what the microsite idea we pitched to them even meant, but later that week I remember the rep was thrilled that they bought everything he pitched that day.
Soon after the Tribune put on a sales blitz of local restaurants and bars to help monetize their online entertainment product metromix.com. My group of four or five designers were at times cranking out 2-3 microsites a week. I remember doing sites for places like Thyme Restaurant, Cubby Bear, etc. It was probably one of the best learning experiences I had, even though we were making bloated websites with heavy javascrips and images that weren't the most user-friendly at a time when many people were still on dial-up connections at home. But at the time we could get away with relatively anything. We were all just learning on the fly for the most part. We learned what worked and what didn't work. Each new site was a blank slate to try and do something different. It was a blast.
In 1999, for reasons I can't quite remember, the Tribune took over the LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon web site. Many of the coworkers I had worked with in the online advertising group had started to move on to other jobs, and I lucked out into being able to maintain the Marathon site in the weeks leading up to the race. It was by far the biggest site I'd ever worked on at that time (and first time I'd ever taken over a site that large that someone else had created, which was at times a challenge since we weren't given any original source files, particularly images). The Marathon site was the first big stepping stone to larger roles at the Trib from just making little tiles and banners and microsites.
The same year, after almost leaving the Tribune for another firm in Chicago that maintained the Chicago White Sox website, I was offered the role of lead web designer of metromix.com. Again, part of this was earned, part of this was other designers were leaving to seek fortunes in the pre-bubble burst internet world (in fact, that firm I mentioned soon went out of business as Major League baseball took control over all leage team sites).
Metromix.com was the first database driven web site with a content management system that I had worked on in my career. The Trib during my tenure there was good for creating in-house platforms their websites would run on, and I remember Metromix ran on a system called Jackhammer at the time (it was the tool that was going to break Microsoft's hyper-local product Sidewalk. Get it?). Jackhammer was the Event and Venue database backbone with was the real meat-and-potatoes of that site for a while, although they had a small staff that did editorial content packages and reviews as well.
Along with metromix.com I started working closely with the staff of chicagosports.com as well. They were on a platform (like chicagotribune.com at the time) called Oxygen, and this was my biggest lead to date in the world of CSS and .jsp templates. Working on these products was like a dream for me, ever since I was a little kid I was a sports fan, and as someone in his mid-twenties working with a local entertainment site covering music, movies, restaurants and bars, it was the best time I've ever had working and learning at the same time.
Even though at the time I was primarily working on sports and entertainment and not the main chicagotribune.com news site, I still remember what it was like walking into the Tribune Tower on September 11, 2001. I remember hearing a few guys talk on the train on the way in about something happening in New York. By the time I got outside the WGN Radio Showcase studio at the base of the Tribune Tower, people were gathered around tv screens watching smoke come out of the Towers. I had just gotten to my desk when the first Tower collapsed. My friend and coworker Chris who managed the design of chicagotribune.com was helping their staff post what initial information was available, but soon had to start rebuilding templates as the site began to slow to a crawl. It was the first time people started to go to the internet en masse to get breaking news information and the servers couldn't handle it. We'd stripped all the advertising tags off the pages, we started pulling features content in place of news from New York and Washington. Pictures in the photo desk online utility were starting to come in with horrible images. I remember going into the newsroom that day and just seeing numb, shocked faces doing their jobs. I do remember just feeling a bit helpless that day. What little I contributed in that grand scheme of things that day seemed insignificant. Once the site was stable (and minimized to its bare bones), I went home and knew the world was a different place.
Then the what was left of the tech bubble burst. After seeing a lot of friends and coworkers leave the Tribune voluntarily I started seeing them leave involuntarily through layoffs. The fun was starting to lose its luster at the Tribune as sites like craigslist, Yahoo, and Google started eating into Tribune profits and print circulation started declining as well. I began to wonder when my time would be up. But round after round of layoffs, I survived.
Other things I remember during my time at the Tribune was the 2003 National League Championship Series, where the Cubs were just outs away from going to the World Series for the first time in almost sixty years. I was in the basement of Tribune Tower (they called it the Digital Underground), ready with a "Cubs World Series Bound" overline to post on chicagotribune.com to launch. And then the foul ball into the stands where a Steve Bartman sat happened, and Alex Gonzalez blew a double play, and then the Cubs lost not only Game Six but also Game Seven so that overline never got used.