Meeting Ted Allen
Meeting my Heroes is an occasional essay series from Matt Carmichael.
Back in the day, a young editor at Chicago Magazine hosted a thing called Journalist Happy Hour. It was exactly what you would think it was. A networking or just war-story-swapping gathering of people who worked in the then-robust Chicago news world. Rivalries were replaced with revelry as folks from the Tribune mixed (drinks) with reporters from the Sun-Times. Crain’s, WBEZ and an assortment of local TV, Radio, print and even online people. The host was low-key cool. A good connector who built something valuable. I always enjoyed attending and I met some great people along the way.
And then the host, Ted Allen, yeah, that Ted Allen, moved to New York to take a job at Esquire that would lead to his big pivot and break, becoming the food guy on the first seasons of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Chicago’s a big place. You can do great things here. Yet it turned out that Ted’s drive and talent were bigger than that. He needed to scale up to New York. And good on him. He’s a great guy, and he’s done well for himself. But we haven’t forgotten him, and his roots. We knew him, when.
However that was it. No more happy hour.
Fast forward a few years and I really missed the happy hours. Also the Chicago journalism community needed it more than ever. Things were starting to unravel. So finally I thought, I guess I could just do it myself.
But then again, I only know who I know. But I knew someone who also knew other people. I pinged Scott Smith. Scott was another member – and better-connected – of the community. I knew his twitter feed and we’d interacted on that platform for a while. Eventually I made the bold suggestion that we grab lunch sometime and meet in person. Gasp. You can do that?!?
Turns out you can. And make a great friend in the process.
Over lunch I suggested we revive the happy hour. Between us we would know enough folks. We put together a list. Suggested they bring friends. And we made a thing.
Oddly, the hardest part was finding bars to host it. Which really was… not easy. But that’s beside the point.
For the record, I emailed Ted and asked for his blessing to carry on. Of course he thought it was a great idea.
Scott and I evolved it slightly. In addition to a nice gathering, off-the-record, we invited guests. We had friends who were doing cool things for the city, and other organizations that were interested in or of interest to journalists. They would talk about whatever they wanted, but not for very long. And then we all went back to drinking. This is a favorite format of mine, to this day.
We also used these events to make new friends. You’ll meet one of them later.
Over the years, I’ve done this again and again in different ways. I’ve created advisory boards. I’ve created group chats. I started a networking group at Crain’s for its 40 Under 40s. I’ve put together urbanists, futurists, business leaders and more. A few things happen:
They all get to meet each other. Interesting people working on interesting things. That’s…. Huge. And powerful. They get to have those connections from then on. Everybody learns from each other. I get to meet everyone. That’s a fascinating place to be, because by default I wind up in the room, too.
Be a connector. Everybody wins, and learns and grows. Building communities is a super power. But it’s not one that takes super strength. Or even money. Just be curious. Be friendly. Give people interesting problems that they will want to solve. Fill voids. Taylor Welden built a great community of otherwise disparate folks with a single common, niche interest. I guess I have, too.
I couldn’t have built any of these communities with only the people I knew as a starting point. Choose your friends and your partners wisely. As I keep saying, surround yourself with interesting people. Journalist Happy Hour wouldn’t have happened without Scott. That’s an important thing, too. When I say that if you give interesting people interesting projects, they’ll want to get involved. I think Scott would agree that’s what happened here.
Hopefully, when you build them, others will pick up the torch when you’re ready to pass it on. But even if not, everyone involved got to meet some new people.
That’s pretty great in itself.
Now I think it’s time to meet arguably the best example of this, Richard Flordia.