Paying below-market salaries for leadership has a surface appeal—I agree that CEO salaries at failing enterprises like Gannett are obscene—but take a closer look. Who can afford to accept a below-market top role, making much less than they could elsewhere to perform similar tasks? Mostly people with established wealth, or high-earning life partners. In a country where the median Black household has just $24,000 in savings while the median white household has almost eight times as much, is that really what we should be fostering?
Apart from leadership, paying less than market can undercut the quality of a newsroom’s work by eventually depriving it of its most outstanding talent. It’s noteworthy, for instance, that the same two Defector staffers whose recruitment was celebrated in a gushing 2021 Washington Post piece are the ones whose recent departures were noted in the CJR article, one moving to the Athletic (which is owned by the Times), one to the Post.
The worker cooperatives generally do offer health insurance, or minimal subsidies to purchase it, but most don’t yet provide any retirement benefits. Defector says it is considering adding this, and I strongly encourage them to do so. In the darkest days of Spring 2020, when the economy was in free fall, I said that we would not cut retirement benefits at ProPublica no matter how far revenues fell short. I advised the same even to those elsewhere for whom the alternative was limited layoffs, and still think that was the right call. Retirement benefits, especially as paid to younger employees, are a critical element of future economic security, no less than health coverage, even if the consequences are not as quickly evident.
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