Mike Reed, CEO of the largest newspaper company in the U.S., Gannett Inc., was given total compensation last year worth $3.9 million, a 14% increase over the previous year.
According to the company’s annual proxy filing on Friday, that’s 76 times the total annual pay for the company’s median employee, which was $50,856. Meanwhile, median employee compensation fell last year by $179, a fraction of a percent, as inflation rose 3.4% over the same period.
McLean, Virginia-based Gannett (NYSE: GCI) is the largest provider of journalism in the nation, employing nearly 10 times as many journalists as the Boston Globe and twice as many as the New York Times. Gannett owns USA Today as well as news organizations covering 220 local communities across the nation, according to a filing last month.
More than half of Reed’s 2023 compensation was made up of a $900,000 salary and non-equity incentive, or bonus, of $1.3 million. Reed was also given stock awards valued at $1.7 million.
A company spokesperson declined to comment on Reed’s compensation.
Gannett, which was founded in 1918, has been slashing expenses for years ever since it was acquired by New York-based GateHouse Media in 2019, which took on $1.8 billion in high-interest debt in order to finance the deal.
In its most recent financial filing, Gannett said it still owes $1.14 billion in total debt. For 2023, it reported a net loss of $23 million on $669 million in revenue, and said it expects revenue to decline in 2024 by a percentage “in the low- to mid-single digits.”
The total headcount at the company has decreased by more than half — 59% — from the total headcount at the two companies at the start of 2019, just before the merger. In 2023, Gannett’s total employees fell by 11% to 10,000, according to an annual public filing.
The number of Gannett’s U.S.-based journalists totaled 3,200 as of the beginning of this year, the company said in its annual filing. That’s 100 fewer journalists, or 3%, than a year earlier, despite a company executive’s assertion on a podcast in February that it had then hired 500 content creators since June 2023. According to Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University who writes a popular local blog called Media Nation, Gannett’s chief content officer, Kristin Roberts, told Mike Blinder of the podcast “E&P Reports” that there would be more hires in coming months.
Contacted for this story, a Gannett spokesperson said that the 500 “content creators” Roberts mentioned on the podcast were not all journalists, which helps explain how the number of overall journalists at the company declined. Additionally, the spokesperson said that “attrition is a factor,” so some journalist jobs may have been cut or left unfilled in 2023 even as there was hiring.
Gannett’s history of staff cuts and low wages spurred a walkout last June in which hundreds of employees refused to work for a day in what was described as the largest labor action in Gannett’s history.