Shed a tear for Gannett’s Reed, whose compensation has been cut to just $3.4 million

I guess we’ll have to start referring to Mike Reed as Gannett’s $3.4 million man.

According to Gannett’s just-released proxy statement for 2022, Reed, the newspaper chain’s chair and CEO, received nearly $3.4 million in total compensation last year, down from $7.7 million the year before. That’s a decline of 56%, but it’s still a healthy pay package for someone who has wreaked so much destruction on the local news business. It’s also 66 times more than the median salary ($51,035) earned by Gannett employees in 2022, as Don Seiffert observes at the Boston Business Journal. Seiffert broke the news about Gannett’s latest numbers on Friday afternoon.

The main difference in Reed’s compensation package is that he received just $2 million in stock awards in 2022, down from about $6 million in 2021. His base salary was cut slightly as well, from $900,000 to $859,615, but he also received a bonus of $513,652 in 2022, which he did not get in 2021. Finally, he got a 401(k) match of $6,184 in 2022, something he didn’t get in 2021. I guess we can refer to that last as rubbing-it-in money, since Gannett suspended 401(k) matches for its employees last October. If they were restored later on, I haven’t heard about it.

Gannett’s chief financial officer and chief accounting officer, Douglas Horne, received nearly $2.2 million in 2022, up from about $1.75 million the year before. And all but one of Gannett’s nine non-executive board members continued to receive in excess of $200,000 for their part-time work — which, as I reported last August, was at least generous, and perhaps excessive, when compared to other publicly traded companies. You’d think that would especially be the case for Gannett, whose stock price opened 2022 at $5.54 a share and closed the year at $2.03. (It’s now down to $1.87.)

Gannett is our largest newspaper chain, but it’s hard to say exactly how large. At one time it published more than 200 dailies and a slew of weeklies, but it’s been closing weeklies in droves over the past few years. Just last week, Sara Fischer of Axios reported that Reed was predicting the closure of more papers moving forward. Just recently a knowledgeable industry observer told me that they wouldn’t be surprised if Gannett got down to about 30 dailies, including its flagship, USA Today, and zero weeklies in the not-too-distant future.

Gannett’s annual meeting is scheduled for June 3. If the past is any indication, though, the only complaint will be that Reed hasn’t cut enough.