Exit Squires
Icy! Well, what did anyone expect. Jim Squires couldn’t stand Madigan and he’d let Madigan and everybody else know it. Actually, in his eight and a half years as editor, Squires hardly got along with anybody in the Tower hierarchy, save for Stanton Cook, CEO of the parent Tribune Company and nominal publisher of the Tribune, and Charles Brumback, who preceded Madigan as president of the Tribune. Of course, those were the two that counted. They gave Squires a generous leash, and Squires as editor took authority over strategic planning that most publishers reserve for themselves.
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Last Christmas, Jim Squires gave a little speech to his editors. He talked about the Tribune’s history and traditions. He said what a pleasure it had been moving the paper onward with the assembled.
It would be 12 more months, but they were right. “I think that’s when my career at the Tribune did end,” Squires told us, as he looked back to last December. It ended when Brumback moved up to corporate president, and his Tribune job, which Squires wanted, went instead to John Madigan. What the New York Times last Monday called “a bruising corporate power struggle” had ended in Squires’s defeat. In a short time, Squires assumed, Cook would let Madigan become publisher, too, and the job of editor of the Tribune would unpalatably diminish.
So he stayed, bending a lot of ears about what he’d do next, still zealously guarding the fourth floor but cut out of Task Force 2000, the strategic planning group that Madigan ran from his office on three. Jack Fuller was on the task force, and Fuller made a splendid report to the newspaper’s middle managers two days before his ascension was publicly announced. By then the lords of the Tower had told Squires there was no reason for him to hang around any longer.
“They seem to be giving me credit, or some blame, for the constant churning in the newsroom–and I’m a little piqued,” he said. “I don’t think anyone knows what they’re talking about. I’ve churned up the newsroom, no doubt about that. But that’s less a facet of my personality than a calculated need to achieve an end. Basically, the Tribune, when I came here in the 80s, was still organized like it was in the 30s.”
We asked Squires about the disconcerting newness facing him. He’s 46. He doesn’t have a job. For a while this year he talked up the idea of writing a column in Washington, but now he said, “I thought that might be a graceful and comfortable way to exit as editor of the Tribune. But that was never really offered to me as an alternative and I never pursued it with any vigor.”
