“Why not occupy the newsrooms?” asks media columnist David Carr of the New York Times. Carr notes that, like Wall Street financiers, newspaper executives are reaping massive bonuses for lackluster performance:

[…] Craig A. Dubow resigned as Gannett’s chief executive. His short six-year tenure was, by most accounts, a disaster. Gannett’s stock price declined to about $10 a share from a high of $75 the day after he took over; the number of employees at Gannett plummeted to 32,000 from about 52,000, resulting in a remarkable diminution in journalistic boots on the ground at the 82 newspapers the company owns.

Never a standout in journalism performance, the company strip-mined its newspapers in search of earnings, leaving many communities with far less original, serious reporting.

Given that legacy, it was about time Mr. Dubow was shown the door, right? Not in the current world we live in. Not only did Mr. Dubow retire under his own power because of health reasons, he got a mash note from Marjorie Magner, a member of Gannett’s board, who said without irony that “Craig championed our consumers and their ever-changing needs for news and information.”

But the board gave him far more than undeserved plaudits. Mr. Dubow walked out the door with just under $37.1 million in retirement, health and disability benefits. That comes on top of a combined $16 million in salary and bonuses in the last two years. [NYT]

Lest you think this is an isolated aberration, Carr points out that the Tribune Company is paying out up to $115 million in bonuses as part of a deal to exit bankruptcy. “The Tribune story includes overleveraged purchases, feckless management and a culture of personal enrichment, all hallmarks of the Wall Street way that have left protesters enraged,” Carr writes.

Gannett and Tribune executives tried to make newspapers profitable by slashing news budgets and payrolls. They sacrificed journalistic quality without restoring profitability. They have reaped bonuses for doing so.

Carr argues that the optics of these deals is bad management piled on injustice:

Newspapers are asking their employees for shared sacrifice and their digital readers to begin paying. So, lucrative packages won’t cut it. As newspapers all over the country struggle to divine the meaning of the Occupy protests, some of the companies that own them might want to listen closely to see if there is a message there meant for them.

Clearly, reporters are part of the 99%.

[Photo credit: wili_hybrid, Creative Commons.]