"The voting trust also wants to ensure that the Toronto Star remains true to the Atkinson principles." Honderich will say about the continuing interplay. "The voting trust understands that it is the full responsibility of the CEO to run the corporation," is all Mr. A member of one of the five families that bought control of the Star when Joseph Atkinson died in 1948, he is the incoming chairman of the voting trust that ultimately controls Torstar and its flagship newspaper - he is Mr. Honderich is still very much on the scene. What makes this fight of more pressing interest is that Mr. Atkinson wrote in his will 58 years ago, "while still important, subsidiary to what I consider to be the chief functions of a metropolitan newspaper." Principles and profits can co-exist, of course, and have done so at the Star for years, but when the two forces collide, principle is supposed to win out - "the profit motive," Mr. Honderich is said to have thought excessive. Prichard's mission, of course, is profits - the business plan implemented by the Star last year calls for a 20-per-cent return, something Mr. Honderich, in the black-and-white terms favoured by those who chronicle the Star's epic battles, represented principles, specifically a binding code of progressive editorial values developed by the newspaper's founder, Joseph Atkinson, which remains the foundation of the paper's editorial mission. CEO Robert Prichard amid rumours of a quarrel over the fundamental values of the Star - which in old-time Star terms might be boiled down to the headline Principles or Profits? His arrival at the Star has been eagerly awaited by media-watchers since the abrupt departure in May of long-serving publisher and de facto editor John Honderich, pushed aside by Torstar Corp.
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