It’s a minute between news blocks and Ryan Baker is on set at the NBC5 Chicago studio joking with veteran journalists, Warner Saunders and Allison Rosati. “Five, four, three, two, one,” calls out the floor director. Saunders tosses to sports. Baker’s eyes light up and his rich baritone voice booms across the airwaves. Baker is clearly on his A game.
But there’s no room for a B game when you’re the station’s head sports guy working in the country’s number two news market. Frankly, you are replaceable. Baker gets this. It’s a reality that was emphasized by his mentors: the late, legendary national sports journalist Ralph Wiley, and veteran Chicago sports journalist Jim Rose. Paying it forward, Baker mentors aspiring journalists and students, urging them to work hard, be prepared and focus.

“I also tell them to have a working knowledge of everything going on in the industry,” says Baker, an Illinois native. “It makes you more marketable. It gives you options.”

Baker started out as a photographer in Champaign, Ill., then worked as a broadcast news reporter, producer and video editor in markets from San Diego to Orlando, Fla. Throughout all these moves, Baker relied on Rose, a 25-year ABC7 sports anchor and reporter, for critiques and industry advice. And when NBC5 hired Baker in 2003, Rose proved his biggest cheerleader.

“I saw Rose at a Bud Billiken parade, and he was screaming and shouting my praises,” laughs Baker.
Rose, too, had a mentor: Warner Saunders. “I’m continuing the chain, so to speak,” Rose says. “As an African American in an industry in which we’re underrepresented, I understand that the few who try and get in need all the help they can get. I had one request,” he says of the help he gave Baker. “That he do the same.”
So what makes Baker an effective mentor? For starters, his work ethic. That’s something interns and budding journalists can emulate, says Geoff Glick, NBC5 sports producer. “He’s very driven,” Glick says. “He’s very hands on. He wants to get the information first hand—from the horse’s mouth—and he involves the interns in the news-gathering process.”
That was the quality that led Wiley to take Baker under his wings as one of his dozen or so mentees. “You had to make the cut with him,” Baker says, recalling the popular author and contributor to ESPN.com and ESPN’s Sports Reporters and SportsCenter. “Ralph was very good at instilling confidence and keeping you focused on the big picture.”

Wiley died suddenly in 2004. His obituary hangs in Baker’s office among the awards and trophies, college sports schedules from Baker’s alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and life-size posters of sports greats Michael Jordan and the late Walter Payton. The obituary cover reads, “All a man’s got is the integrity of his work.”
Lesson learned.