I feel like there have been a tremendous amount of people who have helped lift me up.” “It never has really been easy, but as long I’ve been doing it, I figure things out. Through all of these failures and successes, Baim is proud of herself for sticking around. It leads you into a career in business, to know you will have failures and you will have successes and not to let either of those distort your views of the long haul.” I think the experience I had in team sports cannot be underestimated. She explains, “Playing team sports-and women for generations did not get that experience-teaches you how to win and how to lose, that no one person is more important than the other. While she is happy taking the heat when things go wrong, she doesn’t feel her role is more important than anyone else’s, and she largely credits this outlook to something that changed her life in childhood: Title IX.īaim started playing sports when she was very young and continued to play amateur sports until she was forty years old. “In all my years at WCT, maybe people saw me as a leader, but I always felt I was part of the team.” For her, all projects become about building the right team. “I don’t even know if I would call myself a leader so much as I am a gatherer,” she says. So if there are problems, they know about it before anyone else does.”īaim believes it is her community-building skills that have allowed her to be an effective leader for so long. “I also think one of the most important things is communication with people you’re serving. “Be transparent in everything you do with your investors and your clients,” she says. “I married the best of both of those things,” Baim says.Īs she worked to grow her strength in the business side of things, it quickly became clear to Baim that open communication was key. WCT, however, had better business connections and stronger relationships with advertisers. It was inclusive, she says, to women, trans people, and people of color. Baim felt Outlines did a better job connecting with the community. Merging the papers meant utilizing each of their strengths. “I feel like I don’t have the luxury, having survived and witnessed, to rest.” “To this day I can see the faces of the people I was covering back then who were fighting for their lives,” Baim says. Her journalism career began in the mid 1980s, and what has always kept her going are the people she met during that time-LGBTQ people fighting every day for their right to exist, and, for those who became victims of the AIDS epidemic, fighting to survive. In 2013, Baim founded the March on Springfield for Marriage Equality, and in 2014, she was inducted into the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Hall of Fame.įor Baim, though, it’s never been about the awards or recognition. She’s written several books, and in 2005, she won the Studs Terkel Award, which honors Chicago journalists that offer new perspectives on social issues. She has founded several Chicago-based LGBTQ publications as well as the Pride Action Tank, which works to improve safety, health, and progress in the LGBTQ+ community. Baim has proven time and again that she can in fact do a lot.

Nancy simon baim