Ciao for Now
He didn’t go alone. His longtime number two, David Radler, resigned as president and COO of Hollinger and publisher of the Sun-Times, and lesser executives also tumbled. They all departed in what could be construed as disgrace.
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Hollinger International allows that the payments hadn’t been “authorized or approved by either the audit committee or the full board of directors of Hollinger.” What’s more, the $16.55 million paid to the holding company was never disclosed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Hollinger International had reported the payments to its executives, but the company had told the SEC “that the payments in question had been authorized by the independent directors of the board, which did not occur, and that the payments were made ‘to satisfy a closing condition,’ which was not accurate.” Now Black and Radler have agreed to repay Hollinger the full $7.2 million, plus interest, that each received in these “unauthorized payments.”
Gordon Paris, a New York investment banker who chaired the special committee, is replacing Black as CEO and Radler as president, while Daniel Colson, publisher of Hollinger’s British paper, the Daily Telegraph, is the new COO. John Cruickshank, the Sun-Times’s vice president of editorial, was moved up Tuesday to publisher of that paper and COO of the entire Chicago Group.
The new nameplate was worked up by an outside designer named Jim Parkinson from a typeface called Big Caslon. It’s a dramatic change from the lumpish old Gothic, and it’s the only piece of the Sun-Times redesign that wasn’t created in-house. The new front page is dramatically different, and the day before its November 5 debut, editor in chief Michael Cooke and then vice president of editorial John Cruickshank alerted their staff by e-mail of the “next crucial step in our stealthy remake of the look and the character of our newspaper….Why the stealth? Unlike the Tribune, that loudly trumpeted very little innovation, we, with far fewer resources, have sought to make substantial changes for a skittish readership cautiously.”
At the time the paper was building a new south-side printing plant stocked with new offset presses that would allow the paper to be subtler and more elegant in its visual effects. Reason, who’d been named an assistant managing editor, created a prototype.
