MEN Media Sacks Journalists, And Alan Rusbridger’s Pension

THE Press Gazette reports on job losses MEN Media - “publisher of the Manchester Evening News and related weeklies, has told staff that 150 jobs are to go and all weekly editorial offices will be closed.”

Staff on the newspapers, part of the Guardian Media Group, were told of the job cuts in a series of briefings with management this morning.

The number of jobs going in editorial is 78. According to the National Union of Journalists, half of the journalism job cuts will come from the MEN itself.

As a result, the MEN editorial team will shrink from 90 to about 50.

Meanwhile, upstairs and down south:

In 2005, for the second year running, Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, was paid a bonus of £175,000 “in recognition of his leading role in the successful launch of the new-format Guardian and Observer newspapers”. This has goneinto his pension pot, along with a further employer’s contribution of £134,000. His salary rose from £272,000 to £312,000.

Anyone know what he got last year? Piers Morgan spoke with Rusbridger in April, 2007:

PM: What’s your current salary?

AR: It’s, er, about £350,000.

PM: What bonus did you receive last year?

AR: About £170,000, which was a way of addressing my pension.

PM: That means that you earned £520,000 last year alone. That’s more than the editor of The Sun by a long way.

AR: I’ll talk to you off the record about this, but not on the record.

PM: Why? In The Guardian, you never stop banging on about fat cats. Do you think that your readers would be pleased to hear that you earned £520,000 last year? Are you worth it?

Anyone..? Well, let’s star with an easier one: what did the sacked hacks earn, and how many would it take to edit a newspaper that one day will exist only online?

Anorak

Posted: 10th, March 2009 | In: Money Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink