Good jobs at good wages

Context is everything. Yesterday, I wrote about the compensation packages of GateHouse Media's top two officials, chief executive Michael Reed and the just-promoted president and chief operating officer, Kirk Davis.

What I wrote was accurate, but I failed to consider what top executives might be making at other newspaper companies. As it turns out, there's nothing special about Reed's salary ($925,000 in 2007) or Davis' (about $461,000). Reed's 2006 compensation, $6.4 million, included a lot of stock, the value of which has presumably all but disappeared.

With 2007 revenues of $589 million, GateHouse is on the smaller end of the publicly traded newspaper companies I looked at this morning. But its challenges are as great or greater than those of much larger companies — it's staggering under a debt load of $1.2 billion, and its stock price has fallen so much that it was delisted this fall by the New York Stock Exchange.

Anyway, here's a quick cruise around a few other newspaper companies and what they paid their top managers in 2007, ranked by 2007 revenues.

Gannett Co. ($7.4 billion)

• Craig Dubow, chairman, president and chief executive officer: salary, $1.2 million; total compensation, $7,546,710
• Gracia Martore, chief financial officer, executive vice president: salary, $700,000; total compensation, $3,026,985
• Susan Clark-Johnson, chairwoman of U.S. community publishing: salary, $735,000; total compensation, $3,145,339
• Not-so-fun fact: Employees have been told to take a one-week unpaid furlough during the first quarter of 2009
• Financials from WSJ.com

New York Times Co. ($3.2 billion)

• Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman: salary, $1,087,000; total compensation, $3,439,280
• Janet Robinson, chief executive officer: salary, $1 million; total compensation, $4,142,410
• Michael Golden, vice chairman: salary, $1 million; total compensation, $1,706,579
• James Follo, chief financial officer and senior vice president: salary, $480,000; total compensation, $859,273
• Not-so-fun fact: A recent, widely disputed essay in the Atlantic speculates that the flagshap New York Times could cease publishing as early as this May
• Financials from WSJ.com

McClatchy Co. ($2.3 billion)

• Gary Pruitt, chairman and CEO: salary, $1.1 million; total compensation, $4,635,355
• Patrick Talamantes, chief financial officer and vice president for finance: salary, $500,000; total compensation, $938,970
• Three vice presidents of operations are paid salaries in the range of $500,000 to $600,000; total compensation is around $1.1 million apiece
• Not-so-fun fact: The debt-burdened chain is trying to sell the Miami Herald, but can't find any takers
• Financials from WSJ.com

Journal Register Co. ($463 million)

• James Hall, chairman and chief executive officer: salary, $394,750; total compensation, 411,233
• Scott Wright, president and chief operating officer: salary, $201,923; total compensation, $231,040
• Julie Beck, executive vice president and chief financial officer: salary, $337,500; total compensation, $431,510
• Robert Jelenic, former chairman and chief executive officer: salary, $945,396; total compensation, $6,318,394 (Jelenic died last month)
  
• Not-so-fun fact: The deeply troubled company is closing some of its papers and selling off others
• Financials from the company's 2008 proxy statement (PDF)
  

What's the takeaway? Top executives at newspaper companies, like top executives everywhere, make a lot of money. We tend not to notice when times are good. But with the newspaper business under siege, such lavish compensation packages seem out of sync, both symbolically and substantively.

On the other hand, if any of these well-paid folks can find a way out of the current morass, they will be worth every cent.

Explaining the Journal Register's fall

Media Nation reader MTS passes along this interesting Newsosaur analysis of what went wrong at the Journal Register Co., the bottom-feeding newspaper company now drowning in a sea of debt. (JRC's best-known property at the moment is probably the New Haven Register.)

What's fascinating about this is the gulf that separates Newsosaur's Alan Mutter from his commenters. Mutter praises JRC's 19.3 percent profit margin, and concludes that the company came to woe not because of the way it has run its newspapers but because of foolish investments.

Many of the commenters, though, say those profit margins were the result of such drastic cutbacks in newsroom budgets that the papers were decimated, leading to their "loosing circulation in heaps" (I hope that wasn't written by a copy editor).

Of course, everyone is losing circulation in heaps these days. It would be telling to see how JRC's numbers stack up with those of the industry as a whole.

Saturday morning roundup

If I were Ernie Roberts, the great Globe sports columnist, I'd tell you what I had for breakfast this Saturday morning. I'm not, so herewith a few observations about this and that.

Deval Patrick's corporate benefactors. The drip-drip-drip over Gov. Patrick's book proposal has been more a source of amusement than a cause for genuine concern. Today's Globe story, in which we learn that he takes credit for the 10,000 people who turned out for a Barack Obama rally on the Common, is a hoot.

But yesterday's Globe story properly noted a real problem — Patrick's reliance on corporations, some of which will have business before the state, to buy books by the truckload in order to hand out to employees and clients. The impression you get is of a governor so convinced of his own rectitude that he believes he's above the rules mere mortals have to follow.

Judge Murphy's future on the bench. A Globe editorial today urges the state Supreme Judicial Court to suspend Judge Ernest Murphy, who was may be fined earlier this week for his bizarre and threatening letters to Herald publisher Pat Purcell after Murphy won a $2.1 million libel case against the Herald. [Correction: The Commission on Judicial Conduct has recommended that Murphy be censured, suspended for 30 days and fined $25,000.]

I assume the Globe means without pay. As a Herald editorial noted on Wednesday, Murphy has been out on paid leave since sometime last year, collecting his salary of nearly $130,000. It's hard to think of a public official who has profited so handsomely from media criticism of his performance — which, no matter how imperfectly it may have been executed, is supposed to receive the highest possible protection from the First Amendment.

Helping the fans by gouging them. The Herald goes B-I-G today with the fact that the Red Sox are auctioning off Green Monster tickets to the highest bidder, with some seats going for more than $500.

The best quote is from Ron Bumgarner, the Sox' vice president of ticketing: "We feel it's our civic responsibility to keep tickets affordable for fans, and at the end of the day, this helps keep other ticket prices down." You can't make this stuff up.

Newspaper-killing chain faces death. The Journal Register Co., known within the business as the cheapest chain on earth, is sinking in a sea of debt and is in danger of being delisted by the New York Stock Exchange. The Journal Register's best-known paper is the New Haven Register, but it also used to own the Taunton Gazette and the Fall River Herald News, now held by GateHouse Media. It also used to own the Woonsocket Call, where I was a co-op student in the mid-1970s.

Cape Cod Today publisher Walter Brooks sent out a blast e-mail with the news, which he titled "Every tear remained unjerked in its little ducts." No kidding.