Tronc Executives Rewarded for Incompetence and Misconduct With Eye-Popping Salaries

You may be asking yourself at this point who Levinsohn is, and what he did to earn his $6.9 million compensation package last year. In August, he was named publisher and CEO of the LA Times. He proceeded to lose the trust of his employees at breakneck speed. tronc ultimately suspended Levinsohn in January after allegations surfaced that he harassed female employees at previous jobs, reinstating him weeks later and moving him to a top digital post at the Chicago-based mothership. His pay outpaces that of top executives at The New York Times, a financially successful and by most accounts well-managed media company.

What’s more, before Ferro was pushed out of tronc, he inked a $5 million a year deal with his own consulting company. He also spent millions on a private jet, which he rented from his own outside investment firm. In March, the same week that several Chicago Tribune journalists were laid off, SEC filings said that tronc CEO Justin Dearborn and CFO Terry Jimenez had signed new, multiyear contracts. The former’s base salary now sits at $600,000, and his potential annual performance bonus was bumped from 70 percent to 100 percent of that figure.

Tronc spokeswoman Marisa Kollias did not return my request for comment.

Newsrooms, meanwhile, have been directed to play digital catchup with fewer journalists and resources. Some raises are being fitfully granted. Two sources within the Chicago Tribune, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs, told Splinter that they had received pay raises from their parent company, as promised. They ranged from a few percentage points to much higher, one staffer said, for people who were “seriously and grossly underpaid.” The paper’s reorganization efforts remained opaque to many rank-and-file staffers, the Tribune sources said, and the tronc SEC filing floating around Twitter Friday was certainly noticed.

“Sure is a lot of money when you’re firing people,” one source said.

In Baltimore, where the Baltimore Sun was nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes in 2016 for coverage of the police killing of Freddie Gray, veteran reporter Liz Bowie criticized the imbalance between workers and executives publicly on Friday.

When tronc offered performance-based pay raises for up to 2.5 percent of employees’ annual salaries in 2016, it excluded the unionized journalists at the Sun as part of the deal. Guild staffers took to Medium afterward to put out a public plea for better pay, but this year they were again excluded from the pay raises given to the non-unionized journalists in Chicago and elsewhere. “We all feel like we’re doing more work than we ever have,” Scott Dance, a Sun reporter who chairs the paper’s bargaining unit, told Splinter.

Reporters’ salaries often start at $30,000, Dance said, with the newsroom’s pay scale for that position topping out at $62,000 a year. It’s not much for the core piece of a news organization. And it would surely make knowledge of astronomical executive compensation more difficult to swallow, particularly for journalists who know how those executives’ far-off edicts play out at the local level.

“We don’t know any of those people,” Dance told me. “They’re in Chicago or LA…Everyone in Baltimore wants to do what’s best for the Sun.”

If you work at a tronc-owned newspaper, I’d love to talk: [email protected].