Could one Gannett executive’s salary pay for a whole newspaper’s annual budget?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

A little context, if you will.

I used to work for the New York Sun as the paper’s online editor. In the wee hours of October 1, 2008, I queued a package of headlines, links, and photos, and hit ‘publish’ in our creaky yet efficient content management system. Then I grabbed my coat, headed for the bar, and drank late into the night with a dozen editorial staffers who had just lost their jobs at the little New York City broadsheet that could.

We all knew that the paper was losing money, but we never knew exactly how much. A profile of the paper and our great boss, Seth Lipsky, published shortly after our paper’s demise, offered some clues as to the amount of money the paper was losing on an annual basis – around $20 million:

“Our losses, which are substantial,” Lipsky wrote, “have been covered so far by a group of investors whom we would call heroic.” It would seem, however, that after seven years and reported expenditures of more than $100 million, it was more the losses that were heroic. The paper’s crusading conservatism was dear to its backers, and in the recent neo–Gilded Age New York, much wealth had been put to long-shot use. But the Sun was losing more than $1.5 million a month, and its cadre of right-leaning Jewish investors—Michael Steinhardt, Roger Hertog, Bruce Kovner, and Thomas J. Tisch—were unwilling to pay to keep the house organ playing.

“It was really starting to wear on us a little,” says Michael Steinhardt, a retired money manager. “What we needed, as a minimum, was an investor or a group of investors who would contribute $10 million per year, to be matched by the current group of investors. That would give us about $20 million, which is what we were losing.”
The Seven-Year Run of the New York ‘Sun’ — New York Magazine

Recalling this number, I am even more shocked by this report at Gannett Blog (HT: Romenesko) that Gannett CEO and Chairman Craig Dubow earned $4.7 million in 2009 (a $1.6 million increase from ‘08). I won’t even get into the business of the giant bonuses lavished on Gannett execs after they slashed 6,000 jobs last year. What’s more interesting to me is that Dubow’s paycheck is almost a quarter of the amount of money that the Sun apparently needed to publish a broadsheet five days a week in America’s most expensive city.

What are the total budgets of some of the papers in the Gannett family that could themselves be imperiled? Does it cost $4.7 million to publish the Burlington Free Press in Vermont every year? What about the Oshkosh Northwestern in Wisconsin? The Greenville News in South Carolina? Perhaps I’m being naive. But it’s hard for me to imagine that some of these papers cost as much to publish every year as our New York Sun did. And that gets me wondering: are large American media companies in some cases choosing between the salaries of single executives and the existence of entire news organizations?