Felix Salmon

pestering preening potentates

Philanthrocrat of the day, ProPublica edition

Sep 30, 2009 15:38 EDT
philanthropy

Paul Steiger’s salary in 2006, his last full year as editor of the for-profit WSJ: $547,692

Paul Steiger’s salary in 2008, his first full year as editor of the non-profit ProPublica: $570,000

Update: ProPublica’s Dick Tofel points out that Steiger did get options when he worked for the WSJ, which brought his total compensation comfortably into seven figures. Steiger gets no bonus at ProPublica. Not that he really needs one, given that he’s earning almost $50,000 a month.

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3 comments so far | Comments RSS
Sep 30, 2009
9:34 pm EDT

Readers may be interested to read the entire relevant graf from Felix’s first link here: Journal managing editor Paul Steiger received a base salary of $547,692, up slightly from his salary of $528,327 in 2005. Steiger’s total compensation, including stock options and option awards, was $1.38 million, up from just more than $1 million in 2005.
ProPublica does not offer incentive compensation.

Posted by Dick Tofel | Report as abusive
 
Oct 2, 2009
5:14 pm EDT

The entire annual budget based on the Sandlers grant is about $10 million. That means two guys are pulling 10% of the company’s annual budget. That’s bananas. Even if they each made $300k, think of how much more journalism they’d be able to pay for. Completely irresponsible, especially for Steiger who’s already loaded from his time at the WSJ.

Posted by guest | Report as abusive
 
Oct 3, 2009
3:49 am EDT

Actually, the Propublica tax document indicates total expenses for 2008 were just $6.1 million including salaries. That means Paul Steiger and Stephen Engelberg, with a million betwen the two of them, took home a sixth of it, or 16 percent of the total expenses.
Who would donate to a non-profit with that ratio?

Posted by journalist guest | Report as abusive
 

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