Sun-Times’s No-Nonsense New Editors

Consider the paper’s two new editors–chosen by Radler and Barbara Amiel, the London-based wife of Hollinger Inc. chairman Conrad Black and the Hollinger papers’ editorial troubleshooter. Wade, 49, has been foreign-affairs editor of Hollinger’s Daily Telegraph in London since 1986. An Australian, he’s been stationed in Washington, and he’s run the Telegraph’s Beijing and Moscow bureaus. Green, 54, covered wars in Vietnam and the Middle East for the old Chicago Daily News, and before joining the Sun-Times in 1990 he managed the midwest bureau of the Los Angeles Times.

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Of the two appointments Green’s is the more intriguing. Apparently it’s no longer a disqualification for high office at the Sun-Times to know something about Chicago. Wade’s predecessor, Dennis Britton, was brought in from Los Angeles, Green’s predecessor, Mark Nadler, from Minnesota. Sentimentalists will also recall Charles Wilson from London, Matt Storin from Boston, and Frank Devine from New Zealand.

The newsroom hopes so. By and large, reporters reacted to Green’s appointment as good news. It got them out from under managing editor Julia Wallace, who took over the shop when Britton quit last month. For all her virtues as a newswoman, Wallace, 38, was considered too callow by her staff to remain boss of bosses. She was held responsible for certain front pages–a recent Princess Di number is constantly cited–that embarrassed not only reporters but, I’m told, Radler and Amiel. Wallace and Green never got along, and now that he outranks her the staff wonders if she’ll even stay at the paper.

Wade made several trips to Chicago and eventually presented his conclusions to the paper’s administrators gathered in the executive conference room. He faulted the paper’s front page and its graphics. He faulted its lack of suburban coverage–colliding with Britton and Nadler, who’d fashioned a Sun-Times that focused on Chicago, and colliding with financial realities. He faulted its coverage of women’s issues. He faulted the paper’s tone, which he judged too dry and unexciting.

“The paper’s bursting with talent,” Wade said from London. (He’ll be taking over in January.) “They’re waiting for a new course to be set.” Which is? But he had no intention of telling me until he could tell his staff.

Gary! You have to laugh. Stinking cesspool. Nothing there but steel mills.