Andrea Hanis is the editor of the Chicago Tribune’s Blue Sky Innovation, which was dreamed up over many hours in darkened research rooms before being given its sunny and aspirational title.
She’s leads a staff of talented journalists who are excited about digital journalism and the opportunity to explore Chicago’s most innovative companies, people and ideas.
Hanis is one of the few Chicago journalists to have worked in the newsrooms of the Chicago Tribune, the Sun-Times and Crain’s Chicago Business. At the Tribune, she led the Executive Profile series in Monday Business. At Crain’s, she launched and edited the award-winning Business of Life section. At the Sun-Times, she edited an award-winning Sunday Travel section.
A Hoosier native and graduate of Indiana University in Bloomington, Hanis intends to one day write a Blue Sky study of “Columbo,” which frequently explored the devious uses of innovations such as the answering machine, traffic camera and home-video security systems.
Hanis spoke with Talking Biz News by email about Blue Sky Innovation. What follows is an edited transcript.
How did the idea for Blue Sky Innovation come about?
Tribune editor Gerry Kern, Joyce Winnecke and Colin McMahon saw the growing interest in innovation and its importance to Chicago’s future. They felt the Tribune needed to make its mark in that world. Some aspects of innovation are of particular interest to certain industries, but we felt that new ideas and technology could also have wide appeal.
Now people look at Blue Sky and say “Of course Tribune would do that.” I’m proud of that because it isn’t easy to absorb a lot of people’s ideas and create a distinct and knowable and doable thing out of them. I was impressed at the leadership team’s flexibility and openness to experiment, and then to hand us the keys and say “Go,” and just be super supportive of it.
Is the coverage separate from the Chicago Tribune website?
Blue Sky now exists within the Chicago Tribune site. We launched in 2013 on our own, when Tribune was on a different platform, to have the flexibility to have a truly mobile-first design. We wanted to capture new readers who might not identify as much with the Tribune brand. And we wanted to promote our own identity and URL. You can now find Blue Sky within Chicago Tribune but also by using blueskyinnovation.com.
We also created our own team and workflow and physically moved to a different location in the newsroom. This was all to support the idea of building and thinking differently and not just swimming in with the legacy newsroom habits.
That was deliberate and freeing.
How much content is Blue Sky posting each day?
We typically post three to five ‘Originals,’ which are staff stories, photo galleries or videos, one piece to our ‘Innovation Hub,’ and a smattering of national tech stories from our wire services. We post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram and send a weekly newsletter. We’ve experimented with Periscope and Snapchat.
We post reader polls and maintain an updated calendar of events. We host our own events throughout the year as well. And I write a week-in-review column each week, The Friday Exit, and it appears on our site but also runs in full on LinkedIn.
And we create content at our live events, which have included on-stage interviews and panel discussions with national and local subjects including Mark Cuban, Chicago venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, and others.
Who do you see as your main competitors for covering Chicago entrepreneurs and innovators?
The news products that cover this world are pretty distinct from each other, but of course we compete on stories. On tech or startup news, John Pletz at Crain’s Chicago Business, where I also worked for seven years, brings great insight. Built in Chicago and Chicago Inno promote the startup industry and create fun, insider-friendly content.
Chicago magazine and the Chicago Reader cover innovators in certain ways. Companies themselves create content and distribute their own news now. Jostling for reader time and affection is always intense, and the competition is unlimited. Everyone’s attention is so fragmented.
How do you make your content different than them?
No one else is curating for innovation in quite the way we are, so our overall agenda differs. The sweet spot for us is combining the professionalism, deep resources and broad reach of a top media organization with some of the specialized knowledge and insider tone of a smart vertical. It’s a balancing act every day on every story.
Our breadth is certainly different: We have a robust calendar of events, Inc. magazine stories, lots of career and business-building advice, and locally written business coverage of everything from startups to Facebook.
How much content appears in the printed Tribune?
Blue Sky appears six days a week in print in the Business section. We back publish to that space from our digital site, meaning stories are repurposed from our website to fill the print space. We were sort of an internal lab for testing that kind of digital-first workflow, and it worked very well.
Tell me about The Vault.
One thing you quickly notice when publishing more and faster online is that your content feels very ephemeral. A story gets some play on the site and social, then seemingly disappears. That reality didn’t fit with our goal of being a resource for business leaders, and it doesn’t provide a sense of a commanding or authoritative voice on the scene. The Vault is really an effort to do classic service journalism with some digital fire.
It includes a list of more than 125 top innovators in Chicago, with career-focused biographies and updated links. We made it very photo-driven, searchable and sortable, using WordPress. We link to Vault profiles from our ongoing coverage of these leaders.
Later we added guides to Chicago’s co-working spaces and business-event spaces. It’s not necessarily a site you visit every day — it’s more a repository of our information in what we hope is a more functional but also visually exciting way, and one we can develop over time.
Are there coverage areas that you’d like to change or improve?
At two years old, we’re still striving to grow and improve all over. Our team has learned a lot about the issues on their beats and built up great sources and are always getting sharper. Tribune is helping with new tools that will help us understand our reader’s likes, dislikes and habits better.
We are constantly experimenting and aiming to improve, and my boss, Colin McMahon, has given us a ton of license to do that. We talk a lot about improving our aim — hitting just the right mark to be smart enough for a niche audience while also interesting and accessible to a wider one when that’s appropriate.
We also have two job openings right now, for an editor and a reporter, and I’m looking forward to finding two more great journalists to add to our team.
What can you tell me about readership numbers or advertising revenue for the site?
Not a lot of specifics, as Tribune Publishing does not break out results by group. We launched with an advertising sponsor and continue to sign digital and print advertisers. But in our role as not only a section of the paper but also a lab for experiments, our goal is to lead the way in what the entire company needs to be doing: focusing on revenue beyond advertising.
That might mean revenue from events, subscriptions, partnerships, other methods of distribution — we are really experimenting with different models. Our readership growth hasn’t been a smooth line but also doesn’t seem to have leveled out yet — it’s continuing to grow, and we’re going to hit a big new high this month. It’s great to close out the year that way.
What’s the obsession with Columbo?
I watch “Columbo” reruns constantly, thanks to Netflix. Columbo could just as well be a journalist as a detective. He’s working sources in a search for the truth. He pretends to know less than he does to extract information, a classic reporting technique. He’s rumpled, with a dirty raincoat and broken-down car, and exploits the class differences between himself and his wealthy suspects. They underestimate him at their own peril.
Many Columbo episodes tackle the devious potential uses of technological developments: home-security systems, answering machines, speed cameras. How can these modern conveniences facilitate evildoing — or expose it? “Law & Order” did a lot of this as well. Remember Detective Lennie Briscoe learning about Internet chat rooms? The tollway E-Z Pass helping break a case? If not, you’ve missed a lot of great TV.
There’s a great clip of a medical investigator on “Law & Order” looking at a victim’s business card and sounding out, “Entra-pra-noor? What the hell is that?” And now we have “Shark Tank.”
