Sun-Times Shake-up–Who’ll Rise to the Top?
“They were very nice to me. They did not want me to leave,” Jaffe said. “They’d always told me they had big plans for me, and one day I would move up to be editor at one of their papers or publisher at one of their papers. But right now this is a good move. I don’t think I’ve finished everything I want to do in sports.”
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Besides sports, Jaffe was in charge of photography and graphics at the Sun-Times; he deeply influenced the paper’s visual texture. His bosses at the American Publishing Company and its parent Hollinger chain–the “they” he was speaking of–liked him a lot. On Sundays, when Jaffe ran the entire newsroom, APC chairman David Radler liked to come in and hang out in Jaffe’s office. “Most of the time we were talking about sports,” Jaffe said, but reporters outside the glass partitions interpreted the bull sessions as evidence that Jaffe had been anointed. Hollinger vowed a “global” search for a successor to Britton, but Jaffe and managing editor Julia Wallace were the apparent in-house candidates.
“She’s got cojones,” said another reporter. “She’s a bubble.” Then added, paradoxically, oxymoronically, “She has that steely practical sense.”
“They’re screwed up on that,” Wallace said. “On the first question, I think that’s something I’m learning as I go, frankly. I had two bosses, then I had one boss, and now I don’t. It’s something I work on, because I do try to push the limits.
Yet the next publisher’s say in the appointment of an editor is likely to be nominal. The Hollinger chain has an editor in chief now, and she’s no one less than Barbara Amiel, the wife of chairman Conrad Black. A London journalist who’s observed Hollinger politics from close up told me, “Barbara will recommend someone to David [Radler], who’ll turn it down at his peril.”
Brenda sniffled. She sat on a park bench and sniffled over Basil St. John, her once and future but rarely present love. A crack Reader editorial assistant turned the matter over in his mind. Brenda Starr, feminist ideal, never shed a tear for any man. Something was wrong here. Then he thought he had it: the strip was being drawn by someone new!
