Dow Jones Chairman Peter Kann — also known as former CEO Peter Kann and Pulitzer prize-winning globetrotting reporter Peter Kann — is retiring after a busy 43 years at the company.

He got his sendoff at the annual shareholder’s meeting in New York on Wednesday, but not before some reporters took the company to task over cost cuts and proposed benefit and wage changes in contract negotiations.

WSJ war correspondent and union member Michael Phillips brought the flamethrower:

- “Managers now routinely tell reporters to take their own photos, shoot their own video, write and read their own broadcast scripts to accompany the stories they write. Other newspapers devote entire staffs to these jobs. Dow Jones, however, wants to have this work for free.”

- On the 2.5 percent annualized raise now on the bargaining table: “We understand that this increase is below the 3.1 percent average inflation rate over the past two dozen years. This is a pay cut, not a pay raise.”

- On Chief Executive Rich Zannino’s car allowance: “In 2006, Mr. Zannino received $173,441 to cover commuting costs from his Connecticut home to Manhattan. That means that each and every working day, the company pays $667 just to get him to come to the office. He gets more to sit in the back of a limo than we get to go into combat… To us it seems very clear: we take the risks, top managers reap the rewards.”

The risks? Phillips summed up the past month: “Pentagon reporter Greg Jaffe’s Humvee was blown up by a roadside bomb in Iraq… A sniper’s bullet missed Yochi Dreazen’s head by less than an inch in Iraq… The hole in the wall behind him was the size of a tennis ball. In Afghanistan, I sat next to a dying girl in a Medivac helicopter, her throat torn open by shrapnel from a suicide car bomb. Her brother lay in the next stretcher, eviscerated by the same bomb.”

Zannino listened and did not respond. Kann did the same, though afterward he took issue with the reporters’ claims that cost cuts come at the expense of quality.