Mark Thompson has got a new job…as Chief Executive Officer, and President, of the New York Times…the US version of the ‘Guardian’…and equally loss making.
How much might the man who presided over the anti-capitalist BBC be paid?
Well look at what his predecessor got paid and her ‘retirement’ fund:
Robinson’s compensation in 2010 totalled $4.48 million, an 8 percent drop from $4.86 million in the prior year, based on The Associated Press’ analysis of data filed with regulators on Friday
Janet Robinson, the New York Times Co. chief executive officer who was pushed out in December, received an exit package, including stock options and retirement benefits, of $23.7 million.
Robinson gets pension and supplemental retirement income valued at $11.4 million, performance awards of $5.39 million, restricted stock units worth $1.07 million and stock options worth $694,164, according to the company’s proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission today. She will also earn $4.5 million in consulting fees for this year.
Robinson’s exit, which costs Times Co. more than the company earned in the past four years, marks an end to a period during which the publisher’s sales and earnings slumped amid intensifying online competition. Times Co. (NYT) stock plunged more than 80 percent during Robinson’s tenure as CEO, which began in December 2004.
Wonder just how much investigation and angst there will be amongst the good people at the BBC when they realise how much Robinson was paid for failure…and about how much the new boy must be getting as he has jumped ship from the poor relation that is the BBC.
Let’s hope all those bankers don’t do the same and scarper abroad when their pay is docked because of pressure from the moralising BBC!
I was attempting to send this as a private message to the “contact us” page, but is seems to be buggered at the minute so here:
Daniel Hannan has a piece on the level to which the BBC is in love with the Guardian, via a Freedom of Information request.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/9475479/Heres-how-we-counter-the-BBCs-liberal-bias.html
Cheers
…really good by Dan the Man. It won’t work because after a few days of all your colleagues reaching or the smelling salts and swooning over overt right wing opinion they’d refuse to print/broadcast it.
Not much that hasn’t been noted here before, but a worthy reprise, especially given the BBC’s Kevin Backhurst getting dragged hilariously into a spat with Guido on how nobody cares… thereby ensuring a lot more folk have now noticed. QED.
Mr. Backhurst appears to be a market rate talent on par with the outgoing DG or Hugs Boaden for on record foot-in-mouthism.
The bit of Mr. Hannan’s piece that I found most interesting was his personal accounts of the pre-selection process the BBC ‘news’ indulges in before the cameras roll or edit suite nips and tucks.
As with taking the lead from the Guardian, a charge surely hard to ignore given the facts of what is read by staff, there are surely questions to be asked by such practices.
Or are the BBC going to say that Mr. Hannan is in error and such things do not happen.
A question worth asking.
Why do I suspect that the answer would be to not answer, close the thread or engage in a vast, expensive internal review before deciding that they got it about right.
Going through my in-holiday emails, I see I made a huge mistake telling a Complaints Director before I left how long I was away. Near every response slammed in while I was away, with a deadline to reply that expired before my return.
Tinkers.
Dan Hanan has forgotten that you have to get past the BBC interview process. The BBC interviewers will not like it when they discover that you read the telegraph.
The BBC are constantly on the look out for any angle that can put the (generally decent) Right in a bad light, and any narrative that can excuse or justify the (generally vile) behavior of Left.
The BBC is full of people who believe that the USSR is the future, and they will distort, exclude, and smear in order to further their Statist agenda.
They are the broadcasting equivalent of Trade Union Pilgrims. They extract money from the taxpayer so that they can supply self-serving propaganda on behalf of the State sector.
They want us to atone for the tragedy of their birth by caressing their egos so that their hatred of life can be assuaged. If you fill their trollies with enough goodies maybe they will stop whining. It is a lie. They never stop. Their narcissism is bottomless.
If you contrast Channel Four with the BBC it is shocking what a Leftist monoculture the BBC is these days. The BBC want a Labour government. Yeah we get it. They want a big Public Sector. Thanks for sharing. They despise the working classes (but not the thieving classes). Got it. They sneer at the middle classes, especially if they work in the free market trying to satisfy consumers. How vulgar. Message received. They are disgusted by freedom of thought. How dare people answer back. We get the message.
Now fuck off you lazy hate filled Stalinist bastards. Just for the record I despise your duplicity. I despise your totalitarianism. I despise your guts.
Now tell me again why I have to pay for your utter corruption of spirit?
Remind me again where I signed up for that – just point it out to me. The form where I rejected the plurality of a free society and gave you a near broadcasting monopoly. Did it get lost in the post?
WTF?? I thought the Worldwide thing was a done deal.
There goes what’s left of that paper. If they think Thompson can magically turn around their digital revenue fortunes when they’ve been trashing their credibility left and right, well, oh my.
Hard to see what a television chief exec can bring to the dying print media. The business models are totally different. The BBC has a guaranteed income too and generates mostly wonderful media (despite the strong lefty bias) while the NYT is just a producer of written words and is losing money.
It’s about digital media revenue, which Thompson has improved at the BBC. Cash, filthy lucre, evil profitsssss. That’s what he brought to the BBC, and that’s what they think he’ll bring the Times.
And you can be assured he won’t have to tell the NY Times reporters to tone down their US patriotism.
He was Director General of a £4bn corporation, but all extracted under threat of prison. Perhaps that’s his strategy for NYT?
Its a good thing, because now he’s been transported to America we will no longer have to look at that pretentious five day stubble, he might take some of his BBC colleagues with him (please, Helen Boaden!) and his leadership will help sink the scummy rag even faster. They deserve each other.
As I posted on another thread will Mark Thompson attempt to move Punch Sultzberger and his NY Times stable of journalists to the Ozarks?
Hey, hey, hey folks, you’re being too hard on Thompson.
Don’t forget this is a man who starting with an empty office, a blank sheet of paper, and a Nokia 3310 payg with ten quid on it, created a standalone satellite broadcaster with ten million (voluntary) subscribers, a billion quid a year of free cash flow, and valued at 12 billion quid.
Oh wait, sorry, no that was Rupert Murdoch. My bad. Public sector managers don’t do that sort of stuff.
I suppose though Thompson chaired a lot of ‘high-level’ meetings, wrote a lot of cheques out to consultants, and wandered into BBC offices smiling patriotically at ‘the little people’.
Sounds good to me: a chance to evaluate those market rate talents in a real market. Doubtless, Markey will sweep all before him, right?
To follow up LondonCalling’s comment above:
I’d love to be a fly on the wall at his first editorial meeting when they break it to him that he can’t rely for revenue on a regressive tax extracted under threat of imprisonment from the entire population of USA media readers , irrespective of whether they read the NYT or one of its competitors: and that he actually has to produce a product that will induce customers voluntarily to exchange their money for his product.
And politically ex-D.G Thompson will be quite at home at ‘NYT’:
1.)
“The Times, It Ain’t a-Changin’:
“Just as it once did with the dangers of Stalinism and Hitlerism, the New York Times is doing its best to whitewash the threat of Islam.”
by Bruce Bawer (2008).
2.) ‘Daily Mail’
“Christianity gets less sensitive treatment than other religions admits BBC chief ”
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2106953/Christianity-gets-sensitive-treatment-religions-admits-BBC-chief.html#ixzz23bWqWeim
“The New York Times, and That Business At the Cathedral In Cordoba”
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/04/fitzgerald-the-new-york-times-and-that-business-at-the-cathedral-in-cordoba.html
It’s a win-win for Mark Thompson. He succeeds and he is a rich genius. He fails and he is a rich ‘professional’ who did the best he could to save a ship that was already sinking.
Like the American who bought the “wrong” London Bridge, perhaps NYT have bought the wrong Brit. Thompson is not Tina Brown, the Brit who who revitalised Tatler, then Vanity Fair and then The New Yorker. Thompson can’t revitalise anything. He is a mortician, he can only paint a peaceful smile on the dying newspaper’s face.
Paint it orange NYT. You’ve been Quango’d.
And his first task is settling a pay and contract dispute with NYT journalists.
Guess what – he gives in to their demands, offers them more perks and better pensions and becomes very popular very quickly.