Media: Please, Journal Star employees… I am begging you
Do not click on the MORE button. The information contained on this post is not safe for your continued pease of mind, and possibly, your mental health. Here goes:
From the Turner Report:
Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicate that at a time when many GateHouse employees are wondering if they have will jobs a few months down the line, new President and COO Kirk A. Davis (pictured) will receive a base salary of $461,260.80. [Former chief operating officer Scott ] Champion’s base salary for 2007, according to a proxy statement filed with the SEC was $200,000. Even with $173,000 in bonus and benefits Champion made nearly $90,000 less than Davis’ base salary.
The SEC filing indicates Davis will normally receive four week paid vacation…except in 2009 when he will receive five weeks because he is carrying one over from 2008. Other benefits Davis will receive include vacation, sick leave, and participation in company medical and dental insurance programs. He will also be reimbursed for travel, meals, and accommodations, the proxy said.
Oh, and if he leaves the company for any reason OTHER than being fired for cause, he gets a year’s salary.
CEO Michael Reed earned $925,000 in total compensation in 2007, which includes a half million in base salary. Of course, this doesn’t compare to the compensation he got in 2006, which was valued at more than $6.4 million.
Meanwhile, the company stock is selling for pennies a share and they just ended payments to employee 401(k) plans. And reporters are covering double beats because the company can’t afford to hire new reporters.
January 14th, 2009 at 12:14 am
Just. Plain. Sickening.
January 14th, 2009 at 12:51 am
The newspaper business is all about cash flow. In this case, it flows out of the Journal Star and into the pockets of these GateHouse geniuses, allowing them to get on with the work of “leveraging assets concretively.”
The Journal Star is STILL too good for GateHouse.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:39 am
I got this sent to me from one of my co-workers this morning (I don’t have to be in to the office until this afternoon), and the only thing that could come out of my mouth was a string of obscenities. Champion works out of my office, when he’s even there, and we still can’t figure out what the guy does.
Now, he’s being replaced with someone who will make DOUBLE his base salary? This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in a long time.
Just last week, employees all across the company were worried they would be subject to hour cuts, staff cuts, publishing cuts, etc., all in an effort to “save money,” and here this guy will be making enough in BASE salary to pay about 18 plucky new reporters.
I, for the first time since joining GateHouse newspapers, despite all we’ve been put through, am numb.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:06 am
Amazing the arrogance of these guys. Very similar to what Bill Stakelin makes:
http://people.forbes.com/profile/william-l-stakelin/67622
Stakelin is the CEO of Regent Communications, btw, another company trading stock at pennies per share, and owners of five radio stations in the Peoria market.
January 14th, 2009 at 10:22 am
I still don’t understand why the employees who used to own the Journal Star sold it in the 1990s (well, I do, because they all were well compensated when it was sold, and I guess I would have taken the money, too), but I think things would be much different now if it hadn’t been sold, and it bothers me that the Peoria area is not receiving less than the full amount of the myriad of benefits that quality journalism brings to the citizens of a democracy.
January 14th, 2009 at 10:23 am
crap. should be “is not receiving the full amount of the myriad of benefits” sorry.
January 14th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
The decision to sell the Journal Star (made in 1995, executed in 1996) was made by the board of trustees, who were appointed by, and mainly consisted of, top management. They said they were acting in the fiduciary interest of the employee-owners because early retirements were threatening the employee stock ownership plan.
Employees did, ultimately, get to vote on the proposed sale to Copley, based on the number of shares they owned in the Peoria Journal Star, Inc. That only happened after The Newspaper Guild and Mailers Union had their attorneys send a letter to the publisher threatening a lawsuit if there wasn’t a vote. (The unions themselves apparently had no standing to sue, but they would have bankrolled the litigation on behalf of all employee-owners.) The vote to sell to Copley was unanimous, or very nearly so.
I did OK in the sale and can’t complain. But the seeds of the sale were sown in the way the ESOP was constructed in 1983. Majority owner Henry Slane made sure that the biggest beneficiaries were longtime managers. It was his paper, and he could do what he wanted, but different provisions might have led to a more durable plan.
I’ve often asked myself the last three or four years what things would be like if the paper were still employee-owned. Frankly, I think employees would be in a panic. The huge recent declines in newspaper stocks would certainly be reflected in the annual appraised values of the Journal Star and, therefore, in its share price.
For all its virtues, an ESOP is basically a 401(k) plan invested in the stock of one company, which the shareholders also depend on for their paychecks. To find out how devastating an ESOP gone bad can be, just do a Google search for “Foster & Gallagher.”
January 14th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
I don’t know how these executives can look at themselves in the mirror. I just saw a news story on TV about New York firefighters working a day without pay to free up money to bring back three of their “brothers.” We should all think this way.
January 14th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Midtown went through as did many other bad votes, self interested, lying politicians were endorsed, the corporate gentry of Peoria escaped scrutiny and decent people were libeled, all under the “journalistic” and “editorial” noses of the Peoria Journal Star.
No reader, writer or subject of the Journal Star should escape the poignancy of Sandberg being to sole dissenting vote to Midtown and it being the underfunded monthly and unpaid freelancer that were on the right side of this issue. But I draw a parallel to Midtown being reamed through the asses of the little people over the prophetic words of one councilman around the same time that the same councilman was one of the only Peorian’s who volunteered to drive to Springfield and testify on my behalf before the ARDC.
Losing sucks. But even that day, the losing before a panel of three “judicial administrators” who reminded me of the city staffers, mayors and other councilpersons before whom Sandberg routinely scored his 1 to their 10, there was that special comraderie only felt only by those who are knowing that they are going to go down, but that history will record that they went down together and that they went down for the side of right.
I don’t recall the number of attorneys who told me before and after my experience with the ARDC that they would never even represent someone before the ARDC because they felt it would have the potential of causing a liability for them with the attorneys within the ARDC who could more directly affect their livelihood and families than any other person. After, my own attorneys admitted that they pulled their punches with the ARDC for the exact same reason.
But the “press”….. Admit it…it is the exception to have a kid with more than a mediocre SAT to end up in a school of journalism. At least it was that way by the time I went to Bradley University. And the so called journalists of Peoria had not the intellect to comprehend the legal arguments, the moral insight to suspect the broader motivations behind the conflict I was in, nor the backbone to stand up and ask questions rather than simply defaulting to authority.
I often wondered how my story and Sandbergs would have gone if Jim Baker had been around. To this day the best reporting I have received in Peoria, not just regarding my circumstance, but that on many issues has been from an overweight, overworked and completely unpaid blogger who shall remain nameless.
So I would close my rant with a paraphrase of a famous stanza:
they came for Midtown and I analyzed nothing;
they came for Sandberg and I said thought nothing;
they came for Ingersoll and I defended nothing:
finally, they came for my job and since I had no readers…..I was left with nothing.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Who’s Jim Baker?
January 14th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
Chase, was that when you were facing disbarment for confessing your client to murder without his permission? Boy, the media was just unfair to you there!
January 14th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
MARTY WOMBACHER RULES HARDCORE.