The next time Polly Toynbee or Jackie Ashley write a column in The Guardian complaining about fat-cat pay packages we should remind them of a fat-cat a little closer to home. Their editor Alan Rusbridger has just been rewarded with a £175,000 bonus to top up his meagre basic salary of £312,000 plus £17,000 benefits. Nothing wrong with that. Successful executives deserve to be highly paid. But that's the trouble. If you judge a chief executive by their results you'd have to say that Rusbridger's record was mixed to say the least. Last year the Guardian lost £49.9 million on a turnover of £237 million. Even if you take out the redesign costs there's still a loss of £19 million to account for. Rusbridger chose to put the £175,00o into his pension , which received a further £134,000 from his employer.The performance of The Guardian compares very badly with the performance of the rest of the Guardian Media Group, which are in healthy profit mainly due to the performance of magazine offshoots like Autotrader (to which my partner has a weekly subscription. Very sad).
£12,000 salary............. really?
ReplyDeletePotty has always been a hypocrite
ReplyDeleteIs Alan Rusbridger's basic salary really £12,000 of have you missed out a zero....
ReplyDeleteMaybe that's what happened on your golf handicap?
Oops. Corrected to £312,000.
ReplyDeleteDid you really mean "meagre basic salary of £12,000"
ReplyDeleteHeck!
Ah, in the time it took the page to refresh after I hit 'send' you posted your correction.
ReplyDeleteNow I look mad :D
I always said he was ahead of his time..
ReplyDeleteBy the by, is Comment is Free currently contributing to GMG's £19m net losses?
ReplyDeleteTotally agree that executives who perform poorly should not be rewarded. Look at On-Digital, for example - £1.6bn of shareholder value wiped out. I hope all the top executives involved with that got their just deserts!
ReplyDeleteAh Iain, you should know better than to judge performance just by quantity rather than quality! The same mistake was made in the early days of employee performance management in the private sector but all bar the dimmest HR person has learnt better by now.
ReplyDeleteAnyway the Grauniad's man doesn't come anywhere near the Mail's boy cool million plus huge expenses - he's the one whose paper is always complaining about ministers' salaries and expenses.....
Do I sniff 'the politics of envy' creeping in your comments box? Thought only marxists suffered from that!
Nothing about the Mayoral shambles?
ReplyDeleteThe sign of things to come now that you are on the A list?
anonymous, no actually. tim Montgomerie and Guido have written about it and I'm not sure I have anything useful to add. For what it's worth I thought the timing was wrong and they should have given people more time to come forward. Not something I can get terribnly excited about I'm afraid.
ReplyDeleteYou may scoff, Iain, but the intellectual demands of the political comment in Autotrader are rather greater than those imposed by The Guardian. And, on balance - Toynbee notwithstanding - the totty's better.
ReplyDeleteSo what bonus would he get if he was successful and ran a profitable and popular paper?
ReplyDeleteHe would be able to afford to be a Peer of Realm several times over then surely.
Iain,
ReplyDeleteI thought the £12.000 was a little over the top for a newspaper nobody eads. In acrtual fact it has taken over from The Exchange and Mart as Jobsearch rag!
Polly Toynbee is a legend in her own mind and is a poor writer.
The Guardian only have poor journalists...look at the meanderings of 'anonymous' the cub reporter/tea boy.
La Toynbee hasn't taken the Scott Trust to task for being so very, very white and male, so I would not expect her to be biting that particular hand either.
ReplyDeleteI remember Alan when he was an impoverished hack and we used to tour the streets of Cambridge with a begging bowl while out on strike. I hope he remembers his old mates.
ReplyDeleteI'm amazed the Guardian makes a loss at all, what with the vast taxpayer supplied subsidies, sorry, advertising revenue the BBC gives it.
ReplyDeleteQuote:
"In the fiscal year from from April 2004 until March 2005, the BBC spent a total of £568,343 on recruitment advertising in a total of 49 newspapers. The recipient of the largest amount of revenue from such BBC advertising was, by far, The Guardian. Nearly 41% of the BBC's expenditures, or £231,944, went into The Guardian's coffers. To put this into some perspective, this is over two and a half times more than the amount received by the next largest recipient, The Western Mail (a Welsh paper) which received £92,388, or just over 16% of the total expenditures. The Times/Sunday Times received a combined total of just £53,326, or a shade over 9% of the total. The amount received by The Guardian alone is approximately equal to the next seven largest recipients combined. And one of those seven, The Manchester Evening News, which received £11,100, is in fact itself a member of The Guardian Media Group."
rog's bit rather raises the question: Is it Al-Beeb that's the mouthpiece of the Grauniad or the other way round?
ReplyDeleteDoes Al-Beeb, the British voice of Hizbollah, slosh any of our licence money into the InterDependent's coffers?
Who pays Robert Fisk?
rog
ReplyDeleteWell said. I knew it was bad but not that bad. Good thing is my mother and grandmother are over seventy now so they can sleep well knowing their already taxed savings they got working as Merton council dinner ladies, will not be going to pay for a newspaper they have never read.
Although my grandmother did tell me once that her family only used "good quality news papers to wipe their arses with." However I am quite sure that statement could not possibly have included the Guardian.
Well, Alan, whenever we hit this sort of turbulence I immediately send a memo to all BBC staff requiring them to write letters to newspapers (well the Guardian mainly, and the Radio Times, obviously) saying things like:
ReplyDelete"£350 a year for the BBC? I'd happily sell my children into medical research and still feel guilty that the proceeds could never repay the Corporation for such a cornucopia of stupendously brilliant output. The TV Licence must rise at once..."
or
"...only a penny a fortnight? a trifle to pay to ensure that our television isn't like Satanic America's, with frightful adverts for things poor people might buy..."
or
"The Tories' secret plan to privatise the BBC represents Philistinism at it most egregious. Jonathan and Dame Kirsty Must Be Saved For The Nation"
That sort of thing.
So fire up those interns, even if it is a Friday night and they were only unshackled from the oars a few hours ago.
Oh and best apply the jump-leads to Lord Belvid Brakk so he's ready for GMTV on Sunday morning - they'll probably have some dozy blogger on... but keep Yasmin on ice just for now, we don't want to look SILLY, do we?
Miss you,
MG
(PS is Pol out of rehab yet?)
Virtually anonymous
ReplyDeleteOn the basis that "the piper calls the tune." I think we can come to the conclusion that the Guardian is the mouthpeice of the BBC.
£3.5 billion of force funded public cash gos a long long way, and not just in "bribeing/controlling" already sympathetic newspapers.
Bringing this full circle, those of us of a certain age will recall how La Toynbee was able to jump ship from the Guardian to the BBC to become its 'Social Affairs Editor', and then back to the Guardian when she tired of it. I do not doubt that the BBC is keeping a seat warm for Jackie Ashley too.
ReplyDeleteHow many right wing polemicists have ever been 'impartial' reporters for the BBC?
Croydonian, I shall take the high road and overlook the opportunity to take a cheap shot at Toynbee re: her "Social Affairs" expertise.
ReplyDeleteFor lo, I am way classy.
Seriously, though, the next time Polly Toynbee complains about some media types being overpaid, remind me to do what I do every time:
Laugh bitterly until I fall off my chair, google her salary, and vow to steal her job someday.
Am I alone?
Surely the Guardian is not the sleepy conservative mouthpiece which is the BBC under Nick Robinson's political helmsmanship - it is the pseudo-intellectual backing paper for cardboard cut-out Tony Blair, and would play exactly the same role for David Cameron if he ever became Prime Minister. Which brings us back to 'sleepy conservative mouthpiece' (s)
ReplyDeleteComment is obviously not free.
ReplyDelete