“Why did I choose to leave?” says John Ambrosia. “I believe very deeply that ethics matter and truth matters, and I don’t know if those things were always as honored as they should have been.”
It wasn’t personal, he insists. He simply knew what was coming and didn’t want to be part of it. Green had instructions to undo damage, but the only change Ambrosia believed would make a difference wasn’t going to happen: spending more money on the product. “It doesn’t do any good to rub dirt on a cut if penicillin’s available and you don’t want to pay for the penicillin,” Ambrosia says. “It’s been four months now, and I don’t see any new investment in the newsroom.”
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Despite Cruickshank’s attempts at strategic planning, says Ambrosia, in the troubled Sun-Times Media Group expediency ruled. He says he made layoffs at Pioneer Press that he later decided were ordered simply because they were a quick way of cutting overhead. Corporate thinking, he says, worked like this: “Let’s do something for this quarter, for this week, and we’ll sort it out later.”
That’s the competition talking. When Green returned he polled 150 former readers who’d canceled their subscriptions in the first nine months of 2006. About 70 percent complained either that their Pioneer paper carried too little local news or that they didn’t have enough time to read it–a polite way of saying that reading it didn’t reward the time it took.
Green admits that when Ambrosia came on “I promised him more staff than he ended up with. That’s something I couldn’t deliver on.” Something else Ambrosia had too little of was autonomy, and before Green agreed to go back out to Glenview he got Cruickshank to give him a lot more than Ambrosia had.
Six years ago when Radler was running what’s now the Sun-Times Media Group, Ambrosia was his vice president of niche publications, a marketing position. He says he quit because he couldn’t stand Radler. But other execs who didn’t like him stayed on. “Don’t forget that a lot of the people who are in positions of authority right now were brought in or promoted by David Radler,” Ambrosia says. “And David had what I felt was a very obnoxious management style. I don’t care if he’s state’s evidence now–I saw a lot of it up close, and frankly it disgusted me.” Radler’s cooperating with the prosecution in Black’s corruption trial, which starts in March. “When he left I had this assumption that with this ever present dark weight no longer hanging over them, people would not revert back to the way they managed when he was there. I don’t think that happened. David’s policy was to set manager against manager, having you quaking in your boots over your numbers, and frankly put your staff at the bottom of your priorities. If you internalized those ideas you actually begin to believe those are the priorities of the company.”
