Entries associated with the tag "Sun-Times Media Group":

The bad news: On Thursday the Sun-Times Media Group announced an operating loss of $24 million for the second quarter of 2008, ended June 30. The good news: Last year's loss for the same quarter was $80 million.

The bad news: "It's no secret that the newspaper industry is in rough shape," the Media Group told shareholders. "Our industry's advertising revenues are being depressed by the significant declines in the industries that are most important to us -- housing, real estate, employment, autos and, increasingly, retail. Some of the issues affecting our advertising revenue are economic, while others are secular. The entire newspaper industry is in a deep recession, possibly the deepest in 70 years. And it may well worsen."

The good news: "As you will recall, on December 14, 2007, we announced our goal of reducing operating costs by $50 million a year. We expect to meet that goal in 2008."

The bad news: "However, double-digit declines in advertising revenue -- 13 percent in the first quarter and 14 percent in the second quarter -- coupled with rising newsprint and energy costs, wiped away the benefits of those cost reductions. With no end in sight to the industry malaise, newspaper companies including yours find themselves looking for additional ways to manage costs and ultimately survive."

So there will be more cuts. (The managerial ranks of the Media Group's Pioneer Press were cut back just this week.) But if there is no good news for shareholders, they expect feisty news, and the Media Group did not disappoint: "We are transforming ourselves from a print company with an online presence to a fully integrated, 24/7 news operation that gives our readers and advertisers the products and service levels they demand. Despite the falling market, we believe we continue to have important new business opportunities."

To find out more about what they are, read the full report to shareholders from CEO Cyrus Freidheim Jr. (One idea's to take the company private, which would mean no more shareholders to report to)." In short," said Freidheim, "the Sun-Times News Group will do everything in its power to emerge as a market leader in this tumultuous but extraordinary industry."

If you're a fan of the corrections columns in which newspapers daily confess their sins, the more trivial the better, you might conclude they gladly stand naked to their enemies. But not so much.

Editor-at-large Mark Fitzgerald of Editor & Publisher observes that troubled companies such as the Journal Register Company and MediaNews Group have decided to stop filing those arcane but revealing financial reports such as the SC 13D and the 10-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It's a trend Fitzgerald doesn't like much, but he expects it to continue.

Fitzgerald, who's based in Chicago, discusses the matter on "Fitz & Jen Give You the Business," a podcast he produces about once a week with Jennifer Saba, an E&P associate editor in New York. Saba assumed what I did: that public corporations are legally bound to file with the SEC. But Fitzgerald explains that companies willing to surrender the opportunity to raise capital via markets such as the New York Stock Exchange don't have to. And woebegone media companies that recognize they don't have a prayer of raising public capital are concluding that the elaborate financial statements the SEC asks for are too expensive, too much of a hassle, and too embarrassing to submit. They'll file whatever the banks they owe money to tell them to file, and Fitzgerald thinks these banks want them to keep under their hats the concessions the banks have been willing to make to keep the companies from going under. 

He observes that the Tribune Company, now that it's gone private, doesn't have to tell the SEC anything the banks that financed Sam Zell's takeover don't order it to tell. And as for the Sun-Times Media Group, whose stock is now worth about 70 cents a share -- it's a prime candidate to tell the SEC to shove it. Fitzgerald savors the irony. He tells Saba it was the brokerage firm of Tweedy, Browne that began studying the documents Hollinger International turned over to the SEC when Conrad Black ran the company and wondering, "Who are all these guys getting all these financial fees? And why are you selling everything to yourselves and getting fees back on top of that?" Fitzgerald continues, "That kind of exposed the accounting house of cards going on -- according to the federal authorities the larceny going on.”

UPDATE: The Sun-Times Media Group announced Wednesday that it has no steps in mind to bring its greatly depreciated common stock into keeping with NYSE standards, and therefore expects the exchange to stop listing the stock. In the future STMG stock will be traded on the OTC Bulletin Board. 

The Sun-Times gets to dump another salary -- Cheryl Reed, the editorial page editor, has quit, and quite spectacularly.

A couple of weeks ago I heard that she'd turned in her resignation -- she couldn't have been a happy camper after layoffs cost her about half her staff. But she was talked out of it (by publisher Cyrus Freidheim himself), and  editor in chief Michael Cooke issued a memo telling the staff to ignore the rumors: "She's with us for the battle."

She's not. She quit again Friday, and today wrote her staff a memo that must have made Freidheim and Cooke wish they had just let her walk the first time. The memo:

"I am deeply troubled that the editorial board members were not allowed to address concerns raised about the Obama [February 1] and McCain [February 3] editorials, even though the endorsements were turned in more than two days before they were published. Instead, wholesale rewrites were done by people who aren't even on the board, including one person who is no longer employed by the paper. 

"I was not even told that a McCain rewrite had been commissioned nor was involved in the process. Yet, the former editorial board editor and another former board member were deemed appropriate for that task. Not only does this undermine my position but it devalues and patronizes the editorial board writers who wrote the original endorsements: an African-American, a Latino and two white women. (As you know, both endorsements were rewritten by white men.)

"The irony is that for the first time in history a woman and a black man are running for President, yet, at the Sun-Times our diversity is disregarded. This is absolutely antithetical to the vision and purpose of my hiring. It also severely damages the integrity of the board and makes a mockery of the editorial process. No other major newspaper that I know of condones editorials -- and certainly not endorsements -- to be written by anyone other than the editorial board members. There is a reason a curtain exists between editorial boards and the newsroom -- to preserve the ethics of the decisions made.

"These actions violate the agreements laid out last Monday that the editorial board would write the presidential endorsements. That is what Cyrus and Michael agreed to do if I stayed. I'm appalled that in a matter of days,  promises to value and support the editorial board were discarded. I know you are angry and demoralized, and I am embarrassed that I believed their assurances to be genuine.

"No matter how much Cyrus or Michael like the endorsements the end does not justify the means.

"I resigned on Friday. I believe today will be my last day. It's been a pleasure working with all of you."

Reed was right. Monday was her last day. She showed up, issued her memo, and was promptly told to go home. She's been replaced by columnist Tom McNamee.

Who wrote the editorials? The editorial board consisted of Reed and Kate Grossman, both white women; Deborah Douglas, who's black; Teresa Puente, a Latino, and Mike Danahey, a white man who's filling in temporarily on loan from the Sun-Times Media Group paper in Elgin. Who rewrote them? I'm not sure Reed actually knows. The former editorial board editor she cited could only be Steve Huntley, whom she replaced, and the former board member would be columnist Neil Steinberg. But I reached Steinberg and he said, "It wasn't me." I was also told by someone at the paper she was mistaken in her reference to someone "no longer employed by the paper."

A year ago Reed, then books editor, told Cooke and publisher John Cruickshank that if given the chance she wanted to blow up the editorial section. In July they told her to. "We are returning to our liberal, working-class roots," she said in a letter to readers, and though "liberal" was promptly amended to the safer "progressive," the Sun-Times continues to bill itself on the editorial page as the "progressive, independent conscience of the city." 

It's a wonderful role for a strong, vibrant daily without a care in the world other than setting the world straight. The layoffs throughout the Media Group have taken a palpable toll on its papers, though apparently they did what they were intended to do. On Monday Freidheim, who's the company's CEO, announced it had slashed costs by $50 million a year and was putting itself up for sale. Freidheim spoke of a "solid portfolio of publications and websites." The Sun-Times, however, looks like it's eight weeks into a hunger strike and has begun to hallucinate -- a regular new feature boasts the paper's been "on Chicago's side for 60 years" and wanders through time, reliving old campaigns.

UPDATE: Here's Cyrus Freidheim's staff memo responding to Cheryl Reed, as posted on Romenesko:

"Today, Cheryl Reed announced her resignation as Editorial Page Editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. We are sorry to see Cheryl leave us and we wish her well in her future endeavors.

"In light of concerns that Cheryl expressed to some of you (and, apparently, to others outside our company), we feel the need to set the record straight. The decisions by the Chicago Sun-Times editorial page to endorse Barack Obama and John McCain were made by the full editorial board. Parts of those endorsements were re-written by others. The effect of this editing was to strengthen the editorials, not to change the positions taken. No change was made to either editorial that changed the message of the endorsements. The changes made, in our judgment, deepened and strengthened the messages.

"In every newspaper in America (and elsewhere), the publisher and editor-in-chief have the responsibility to ensure that the editorial product that goes out in their names is of the highest quality and clarity. We will continue to be mindful of this responsibility.

"Unfortunately, Cheryl's assertions about agreements or representations made to her are just not accurate.

"Both Michael and I are deeply committed to diversity in the newsroom and elsewhere in our company. Our recent actions with respect to the reductions in force were driven in large measure by our desire to maintain a staff that represents all of Chicago."

The hammer has come down at the Sun-Times, where more layoffs were just announced. (Read here about earlier layoffs.) Names you'll recognize are about to disappear, and the strange thing is the palpable degree of relief, even satisfaction, among the staff -- it could have been a lot worse.

Editorial columnist Steve Huntley asked for and received a buyout, though he'll continue his column as a freelancer. TV critic Doug Elfman has been laid off. Special Barack Obama correspondent Jennifer Hunter, wife of former publisher John Cruickshank, took a buyout. Columnist Esther Cepeda was laid off, though there's a possibility she'll continue to freelance her column. Religion reporter Susan Hogan/Albach (known as "Slash" around the office) was laid off. Reporter Kara Spak, who's married to star investigative reporter Steve Warmbir, was laid off, a loss people seem to be mourning in particular. Editor in chief Michael Cooke's old pal Garry Steckles -- Cooke summoned him from Saint Kitts to help out and then gave him management status to protect his job -- was returned to Newspaper Guild status when the guild protested and then lost his job. Deputy metro editor Phyllis Gilchrist resigned because she knew that eliminating her management salary might save a couple of guild jobs. Assistant city editors Nancy Moffett and Robert Herguth took buyouts, as did veteran writer Jim Ritter and business copy editors Chris Whitehead and Bob Mutter. Business editor Dan Miller had resigned earlier.

In all, 14 full-time and 3 part-time guild employees were laid off (on the basis of seniority) and 12 others took buyouts, says Gerald Minkkinen, executive director of the Chicago Newspaper Guild. "In the long run," he says, "the company worked with us and did as much as they could to lessen the pain. I really have to give them credit." So does Elfman, with a cat to feed and a new job to find. "It's not a situation where they're laying off people unjustly," he says, well aware of the fact the company's bleeding money, "and I'm in favor of seniority in theory. It just happened to bite me in the ass." I've caught Elfman on his way out of the office to get a drink. "The Sun-Times has really been great about the way they've handled a lot of this," he says. "But there's a but. I was recruited here, I was asked to come here," he muses. "I guess my message to the newspaper editors of America is if you recruit someone don’t lay them off."

That's the temperate end of the spectrum of reactions to getting canned. So it was a little surprising to be told that Bob Mazzoni, the sports copy editor who's cochair of the Sun-Times's guild unit, seemed to be in a "a pretty good mood" Wednesday night, which is when calls were made to the staffers losing their jobs. It's all relative of course, but Mazzoni allows that in a sense he was. "To get down from [management's] original request of 35 jobs to 17 who are leaving involuntarily made us feel like we had really accomplished something," he told me, explaining that when the guild proposed buyouts management agreed to them at once and -- as was not true with a round of buyouts a couple of years ago -- accepted everybody who applied.

Managing editor Don Hayner is being hailed as a hero around the office. Mazzoni said, "We were told that whenever they had a meeting of any kind with stockholders or the board, Don would be there to plead the newsroom's case. Had it not been for his efforts the original number of 35 would have been higher and therefore the ensuing number of layoffs greater. He looks at the newsroom as his baby and he really felt an obligation to save as many of these jobs as he could, especially a lot of the less tenured people he was instrumental in bringing in."

Layoffs usually poison the atmosphere between management and labor. Not this time, said Mazzoni -- "I actually think this process as we went through it strengthened the trust both sides feel with each other."

Friday is the last day for Nancy Moffett, a buddy from my own Sun-Times days, a happy warrior who joined the paper in 1970 and has been there through Marshall Field, through Rupert Murdoch, through Conrad Black. Moffett told me she feels like a "basket case" knowing it's all about to end, even though she's leaving on her own terms. "It's a circus," she said. "It's a lot of smart people being funny all the time." Working at a newspaper, she's discovered, is something she can only explain to people who already know. It's addictive. "It's like being on crack."

Some good news for a change at the battered Sun-Times Media Group. In its previous incarnation as Hollinger International, the Media Group had purchased Chicago's storied Lerner chain of neighborhood weeklies in 2000 and folded it into the Pioneer Press chain in 2004.  Now the Media Group's undergoing a massive retrenchment, trying to save $50 million, and Pioneer is pulling out of Chicago. Three northwest-side titles were shut down earlier this month, and the three other city papers, all on the north side, kept going only because Wednesday Journal Inc. was negotiating to buy them.

This week the deal was off and then it was on again, and Wednesday evening, appropriately, Wednesday Journal announced it was buying Skyline, the Booster, and the News-Star. The new owners have a reputation for quality -- the Wednesday Journal in Oak Park-River Forest,  Chicago Parent -- as well as for staying within tight budgets by working talented young writers until they're ready to collapse (I'm thinking of the Chicago Journal). Publisher Dan Haley's a good guy and I wish him well.

When businesses, such as newspapers, try to save themselves by throwing their employees over the side, feelings run high. But remember -- today's lucky survivor might be tomorrow's fish bait.

In November 31 jobs were lost as the Sun-Times Media Group merged its Daily Southtown and biweekly Star papers into one SouthTown Star. But both publishers survived. A leaker e-mailed me bitterly: "31 folks canned and they're bulking up the top."

The announcement to the surviving staff began: "In order to successfully launch the SouthtownStar and ensure the proper execution of our editorial mission, Frank Shuftan and Mike Waters will serve as co-publisher/editors. Frank and Mike have done tremendously valuable work over the past several months to maintain the quality of their respective papers while engaging in, and in many ways leading, the process that is creating our new paper. It has been a difficult and challenging exercise, executed within a very short time. We thank them for their dedication and vision, and look forward to more of it." 

Yeah, right. Yesterday the same leaker wrote back to report, "Both publishers got the axe today. leaving tomorrow." Shuftan and Waters issued a joint statement saying their good-byes:

"Dear colleagues,

"Friday will be our last day at the SouthtownStar. We were both informed during the past few days that our positions were being eliminated as part of the company's reorganization. This memo to all seems an easier way to get the word out than some mass gathering in the middle of the room. You can imagine we are experiencing a range of emotions.

"We appreciate the opportunity to have worked with all of you. In Mike's case, he has known some of you for 20 years. In Frank's case, he counts 30 years with some who still populate the newsroom. It is not easy to walk away from such associations.The Daily Southtown has repeatedly demonstrated its commitment to producing great journalism for residents of the Southland. The list of stories and campaigns that have made a difference in people's lives is too long to list. The Star was an important piece in the fabric of south suburban life from the beginning of the 20th century on, in many ways the newspaper of record for this region.

"The SouthtownStar has the opportunity to combine these strengths. Despite the obvious challenges that exist in today's publishing environment, it is up to all of you to see to it that accomplishment and excellence remain the standard. You have the rare opportunity to invent a newspaper, one that honors its past but is not bound by it. Our last directive to all of you: Do it." 

The merger of the two papers is expected to save the Sun-Times Media Group about $3 million. The goal is $50 million.

The Sun-Times wants to eliminate more than 30 Chicago Newspaper Guild jobs, and when guild leaders and union officials met Monday to begin discussions of how this should be done or might even be avoided, emotions ran high. They peaked on the subject of two employees whose jobs are safe. That's because James Smith, a page designer, and Garry Steckles, an editor -- both recent hires -- were just promoted to exempt positions by editor in chief Michael Cooke, thus getting them out from under language in the guild contract that protects members according to seniority. Cooke "was at the meeting. His basic position was 'I can promote whoever I want,'  and he was pretty arrogant about it," says Gerald Minkkinen, executive director of the CNG. "The subject of exempting his buddies and making others vulnerable was a matter of considerable discussion. We were pretty angry about it."

Minkkinen concedes that Smith is, by reputation, a superior designer who distinguished himself at the Sun-Times Media Group's daily in Joliet before coming to the Sun-Times. But Steckles was a mystery to him. Not to me, however. A couple years ago I had a couple of long phone conversations with Steckles, who described himself to me as a restaurant owner in Saint Kitts who served Cooke as the Ed McMahon to his Johnny Carson. "I help out wherever he needs me," said Steckles, and whenever Cooke doesn't, Steckles lays low. "I don't miss it when I'm lying on a beach in the Caribbean," he said about the newspaper biz, "But I always enjoy doing it when I get the chance."

To Cooke, Steckles is a friend so old he's comfort food. "Michael's from Lancashire -- " Steckles told me, "[from] a little village outside Lancaster. He grew up on back lanes with outside toilets. I did as well. It was cold and rough. Michael started work at 16." They both entered journalism, went to Canada, and worked on papers together in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. When the New York Daily News hired Cooke  away from the Sun-Times three years ago to be its editor, Steckles thought he would become the Daily News's Sunday editor. But Cooke didn't stay in New York long enough for that to happen. By the end of 2005 he was back in Chicago as the Sun-Times group's vice president of editorial operations. When Cooke decided to turn Waukegan's News-Sun into a prototypical tabloid, he summoned Steckles from Saint Kitts and James Smith from Joliet to help him do it.

"Michael realized James is a major talent," Steckles told me back in 2006. "He has all the flair of a terrific graphics designer but also a great sensitivity for newspapers." In another conversation, Steckles called Smith "absolutely brilliant," and said that by the time he got to Waukegan Smith had pretty much wrapped up the design work, leaving it to Steckles "to pull together editorial." Pretty clearly, Steckles thought of himself and Cooke and Smith as a wonderful team, and apparently Cooke thinks the same. Gerald Minkkinen says Cooke kept Steckles "under the radar" as a Sun-Times "consultant," and when the guild pointed out that the guild contract didn't provide for consultants, he put Steckles on staff last fall in a guild job. I caught up with Steckles briefly Tuesday and he allowed that "I haven't really had a title" other than consultant. But for the time being I could call him a "copy editor for the Showcase" if I wished, though that will change "under the new scheme of things" to something he can't yet disclose.

The guild is entitled to two weeks of talks before the Sun-Times can lop heads. On Monday night the Sun-Times's guild members met to "brainstorm" -- Minkkinen's word -- possible alternatives to the layoffs. Buyouts -- which the paper hadn't mentioned -- were one, and Minkkinen said he'd like to keep the others under his hat. By the time I got to work Tuesday morning an anonymous guild member had left me a steaming voice mail message. He told me about the two employees Cooke was protecting and he said the staff was “incensed and flabbergasted at such a shameless injustice."

The goal of the Sun-Times Media Group is to cut costs by $50 million and thereby turn a profit and stay in business. At another of its properties, Pioneer Press, publisher Larry Green wrote a staff memo Monday that began: "Today we notified the Chicago Newspaper Guild that we would be eliminating 4 positions in the Pioneer Press editorial department before the end of January." In addition to these four guild positions are two that were held by guild members who recently quit and won't be replaced and four non-guild positions held by editors who'll be let go. "An additional five positions will be eliminated at the Lake County News-Sun [the paper Steckles and Smith overhauled in 2006]. An additional 16 full and part-time positions are being eliminated in the circulation department."

Green said Pioneer Press was closing three northwest-side city papers "where subscriptions and advertising have been weak." But the "suburban titles remain strong," he told his staff, and vowed that he's "committed to maintaining our unique strength as suburban Chicago's premiere sources of local news."

"More with less" I suppose.

After the verdicts were in Friday convicting Conrad Black and three of his executives of fraud, Jim Thompson showed up on WBBM radio and was asked if he felt vindicated. “I wasn’t on trial so I don’t have to feel vindicated,” Thompson replied. It was a smart reply to a sloppy question. Even though Thompson testified three days for the prosecution at the Black trial, acquittals all around might have been better for him: Thompson couldn't be blamed for not seeing criminal behavior going on around him if there was none. But the jury said something criminal did happen--and Thompson hadn't noticed.

Thompson explained, “You can’t go on a corporate board with the assumption management is going to be dishonest. . . . Unless you went on there believing that Conrad Black and David Radler and Mark Kipnis and Boultbee and Atkinson were all out to deceive shareholders from the beginning, you wouldn’t have found it until we did our own investigation after the clues piled up.” He has a point. But Thompson was chairman of the audit committee. That’s the outsider who is supposed to guarantee on behalf of the shareholders that everything management does is on the up and up.

Let me make a comparison with the business I know: the audit committee chairman does roughly what a good editor does. Let’s say the editor oversees a group of writers she considers professional and upright. In a word, she admires them. Does this mean she takes it easy? No, because everyone makes mistakes, and her duty is to catch those mistakes and keep them out of the paper. In Thompson’s case, he was paid $60,000 of the shareholders’ money every year to be the board's worrywart: his job was to save his good friends Conrad Black and David Radler from some silly error in judgment that could eventually bring down the company--like, oh, selling off newspapers and making millions in noncompete payments they had no business getting.

The press corps at the Conrad Black trial split on whether Black should, or would, be convicted of anything. In the end the prosecution got him on 4 counts out of 13--including the biggie, obstruction of justice, which was about some boxes of papers he removed from his office in Toronto. Toronto's in another country with courts and prosecutors of its own--but whatever. The law is slapdash in its majesty. No matter how guilty you think Black was of rigging sales contracts to line his pockets, you have to think David Radler's guiltier. But because Radler was so guilty he knew it and made a deal with the prosecution, he's facing 29 months in prison and Black as much as 35 years.

The jury convicted everybody, and the shocker was Mark Kipnis, Hollinger International's in-house lawyer in Chicago. Kipnis had the best lawyer in the trial, Ron Safer, he wasn't cut in on any piece of those notorious noncompete payments that Radler and Black made millions from, and so far as the press could see, his only crime was acting like a lawyer. In a sympathetic profile of Kipnis the Tribune published during the trial Susan Chandler quoted this zinger from a prosecutor's opening statement: "If there is a document to be signed to complete this scheme, you'll see that Mark Kipnis has a pen." For that pen in his pocket, Kipnis was nailed for three counts of mail fraud.

"Everybody at this company who knew him was pulling for him," Ted Rilea told me after the verdicts were announced. Rilea is the attorney in charge of labor negotiations for Hollinger's Chicago Group, which is now the Sun-Times Media Group. Everybody? I said. Does that include everyone who thanks God the specter of an acquitted and vengeful Black will no longer ruin their sleep? (Sun-Times stock jumped 2.5 percent with the verdict.) "I mean everybody," Rilea said. "Those I'm talking about include some of the union leaders. Jerry Minkkinen would tell you the same thing." 

Minkkinen's the executive director of the Chicago Newspaper Guild, and he got to know Kipnis when Kipnis sat in on the contract negotiations of 1998 and 2001. When Rilea and Kipnis had dinner together a couple of nights ago, Rilea gave him a message: Jerry says good luck--he's keeping his fingers crossed. Kipnis was feeling hopeful that evening because earlier in the day the jury had reported it was deadlocked on some of the charges. Kipnis let himself imagine a mistrial. But Judge Amy St. Eve told the jurors to go back and deliberate some more, and so they did.

I found Minkkinen in Toronto attending the Communication Workers of America convention, and even though the Black verdict was nonstop radio and TV up there, Minkkinen had been in meetings all day and was out of touch. Four guilty counts for Black, I said. "Whatever he got he deserves more," Minkkinen replied. 

Three counts for Kipnis.

"It just saddens me tremendously," Minkkinen said. "Whether we agreed or not, I always had a great deal of respect for Mark Kipnis. I always thought he was a straight shooter. He was one who understood you could have disagreement without unpleasantness. I respected that." He particularly admired Kipnis for conducting himself honorably while representing Radler. "It's hard for anyone to imagine the circumstances under which people worked on the management side under the Radler regime," Minkkinen said. "He would brook no dissension or compromise from his minions. Radler was clearly the driving force in all those negotiations. From my perspective, he had no interest in the newspaper except as a vehicle to make money."

I asked if he ever wondered why Kipnis and Rilea didn't quit. "Yeah, quite frankly," Minkkinen said. "It had to be a very very difficult environment." 

Rilea was on Kipnis's witness list. He expects to be called as a character witness before Kipnis is sentenced in November. "I wish you'd have known him," said Rilea, speaking of his friend as one speaks of the deceased. "You'd have liked him." 

There are numbers you toss around, numbers you think you can prove, and numbers that won't confuse a jury. Back in August 2004, an internal investigation by Hollinger International concluded that deposed execs Conrad Black, David Radler, et al had stolen about $400 million from the company. But when the federal indictment came down a year later, Black and et al (Radler turned state's evidence) were accused of swiping only about $84 million, and that, or some approximation, became the number in play in the media right up to the start of the trial. Yet when assistant U.S. attorney Jeffrey Cramer began his opening statement Tuesday he told the jury, "You are sitting in a room with four men who stole $60 million."

Had Black overnight become $24 million less guilty? If he could keep up the pace he'd be back in Toronto by the weekend.

The papers didn't do much of a job of explaining what was going on. The New York Times simply said the change "seemed to reflect a decision by the government to no longer challenge one of the payments made to Mr. Black." Mary Wisniewski and Natasha Korecki of the Sun-Times, which as a Hollinger paper bears the heaviest burden to get the story right, ignored what Cramer said and stuck with the $84 million.

And they should have: the prosecution was just keeping it simple. The $60 million allegedly disappeared in business deals in which all four defendants -- Black, Peter Atkinson, John Boultbee, and Mark Kipnis -- were working together. The prosecution still maintains that Black, sometimes working freelance, took a lot more. 

Underlining the meaninglessness of the $60 million figure as an actual measure of cupidity, there was Radler's settlement last weekend with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Sun-Times Media Group, which is what Hollinger International has become. To satisfy civil claims, Radler agreed to forfeit about $50 million of his own money and another $42 million belonging to three newspaper chains he controls.