At a time when New York Times managers are forcing all employees to take a five percent pay cut, and demanding even larger sacrifices from the NYT-owned Boston Globe, top executives of the beleaguered newspaper received substantial bonus and fringe benefit payments over and above their salaries, according to a proxy statement released on March 11.
These bonuses and benefits to top Times company executives have provoked growing resentment among Times staffers, and frank anger from Globe reporters who have been warned by Times executives that their paper will be folded if they do not come up with $20 million in pay cuts and layoffs.
On Tuesday, the Times disclosed a $74 million first quarter loss, 221 times larger than the $335,000 loss in the first quarter of 2008. ...
Last year, from January 2, 2007, to January 2, 2008, NYT stock fell by over 50 percent, from $17.45 to $7.59.
The paper's 2008 revenues, $2.95 billion, were down 7.7 percent from $3.20 billion in 2007. After reporting net income of $208.7 million in 2007, the company declared a net loss of $57.8 million in 2008.
For Sulzberger, who became NYT publisher in 1992, the circulation figures since he took over are depressing. If trends continue, weekday circulation will fall below 1 million this year.
Have you ever watched a war and wanted both sides to lose? Well, if you have you can imagine my delight in the Huffington Post's hectoring of the New York Times Company for paying excessive executive bonuses while it is beating up on its unions for wage and rules concessions. Normally, my view is that executives should earn big bonuses by squeezing concessions out of unions -- after all, that's what the stockholders want the management tools to do -- but since the editors of the Times and its affiliated newspapers would denounce that idea as evil I support the suits in this case with something less than my usual ardor.
