With all the million-dollar salaries being thrown around journalism circles these days, you'd hardly know we were in the depths of a media downturn.
While much of the journalism profession is idled, redundant, bought-out and collecting unemployment, a slim layer is suddenly pocketing supersalaries as the media landscape remakes itself around rags -- and riches.
To name a few:
• On Monday, OK! magazine announced the hiring of Richard Spencer, who abruptly left his job as editor of In Touch in January -- after a reported “monumental blow-up” over a demand to up his $750,000-a-year salary. (Read: Spencer-for-hire didn't come cheap.)
• Ron Fournier left the Associated Press’ Washington bureau in June to take the reins as editor-in-chief at the National Journal Group at a salary that is said to be close to $1 million a year. (When I asked Fournier recently if that figure was accurate, he laughed. "If that really is my salary, I'm going to have to speak to David Bradley about [getting paid].")
Read also: "Ron Fournier, Editor of the National Journal, Grilled"
• In May, Janice Min -- who walked away from Us Weekly when Jann Wenner refused to renew her $2 million-a-year deal (“I was making more money sometimes in one paycheck than he would make the whole year,” she wrote in a New York Post op-ed earlier this year) -- was lured out of early retirement by e5 Global Media’s co-owner Jimmy Finkelstein to take the reins at the Hollywood Reporter. Beckman has been doubling editorial salaries all over Hollywood, and no one thinks Min came for less than $1 million.
• In July, it was reported Finkelstein offered Richard Johnson a cool million -- double his current salary -- to leave the New York Post and move to L.A., but the Post told him to sit down, shut up and read his contract.
• In August, Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek's international editor, jumped to rival Time in a deal thought to be close to seven figures. (Zakaria was on the shortlist of candidates to replace Jon Meacham as Newsweek's editor-in-chief.)
• And on Monday, Jay Penske announced that he lured Michael Ausiello (above) away from Entertainment Weekly to launch a new TV site at Mail.com Media Corp. Financial terms of Ausiello's deal was not disclosed, but Nikki Finke got as much as a reported eight figures to sell her site to MMC. (Ausiello said his "decision to leave the best job I've ever had was not arrived at lightly.")
By no means does this mean that print journalism has crawled out of its crater.
Just last week, Newsweek slashed as many as 25 percent of its staff ahead of the magazine’s formal sale to 91-year-old Sidney Harman.
But that only makes the salary inflation all the more astounding.
