Dow Jones severance agreements for House and Kann

Footnoted.org, the SEC filings blog run by business journalist Michelle Leder, has a post this morning about the severance agreements that Dow Jones is giving former CEO Peter Kann and his wife, former Wall Street Journal publisher Karen Elliott House.

Leder writes, “According to Kann’s agreement, he’ll continue to collect a salary of $995K through next April while he serves as Chairman and is eligible for a target bonus of $896K this year. Then there’s another $2.52 million worth of stock. In addition, once Kann retires as chairman, an unspecified number of stock options will continue to vest ‘as if you had remained in service with the company.’ Though the agreement spells out Kann’s duties as Chairman, which include ‘advising the CEO as he may reasonably request’, unlike a lot of these agreements, it doesn’t spell out how many hours Kann will be expected to devote to this. As for House, she’ll receive $1.7 million over the next 24 months and continued vesting of her options.”

Read her post here. She notes that Kann’s severance package agreement is eight pages long, while the one for House is 38 pages long.