{"id":43598,"date":"2024-03-31T17:26:20","date_gmt":"2024-03-31T21:26:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/?p=43598"},"modified":"2024-03-31T17:26:25","modified_gmt":"2024-03-31T21:26:25","slug":"gannett-ceos-total-pay-rose-14-in-2023-as-median-employee-pay-fell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/2024\/03\/31\/gannett-ceos-total-pay-rose-14-in-2023-as-median-employee-pay-fell\/","title":{"rendered":"Gannett CEO\u2019s total pay rose 14% in 2023 as median employee pay fell"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Lakeland Ledger is owned by Gannett.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Mike Reed, CEO of the largest newspaper company in the U.S., Gannett Inc., was given total compensation last year worth $3.9 million<\/strong>, a 14% increase over the previous year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the company\u2019s annual proxy filing on Friday<\/a>, that\u2019s 76 times the total annual pay for the company\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than half of Reed\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A company spokesperson declined to comment on Reed\u2019s compensation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cin the low- to mid-single digits.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The total headcount at the company has decreased by more than half \u2014 59% \u2014 from the total headcount at the two companies at the start of 2019, just before the merger. In 2023, Gannett\u2019s total employees fell by 11% to 10,000,\u00a0according to an annual public filing<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The number of Gannett\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s chief content officer, Kristin Roberts, told Mike Blinder of the podcast \u201cE&P Reports\u201d that there would be more hires in coming months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contacted for this story, a Gannett spokesperson said that the 500\u00a0“content creators”\u00a0Roberts mentioned on the podcast were\u00a0not all journalists,\u00a0which 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gannett\u2019s 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\u2019s history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43599,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"0","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"wpai_generated_summary":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"dois","default_image_id":71799,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[17],"tags":[7999],"class_list":["post-43598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-regional-and-world-news","tag-gannett-ceos-total-pay-rose-14-in-2023-as-median-employee-pay-fell"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43598\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}