Categories: OLD Media Moves

News Corp. CEO to receive annual $2M to $4M bonus beginning in 2016

Robert Thomson, the CEO of News Corp., the parent company of The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s, will receive a guaranteed $2 million bonus in 2016 and a guaranteed $4 million bonus for the three years after that, according to an SEC filing Wednesday.

The filing includes a new contract for Thomson that pays him a base salary of $2 million — the same as he has been paid the last two years — through June 30, 2019.

He will receive a minimum bonus of $2 million for the year ended June 30, 2016 and then a minimum bonus of $4 million for the following years.

Thomson, who was the top editor of The Journal before taking on the CEO role, last received a bonus in the 2013 fiscal year. That bonus was $1 million.

The new contract also calls for Thomson to receive a long-term equity payout of not less than $5 million.

Last year, Thomson received compensation valued at $10,3 million. That included a $2 million base salary and $4.4 million in stock awards, down from $7.2 million in stock awards in 2014. He also received $3 million from a non-equity incentive plan. His total compensation also included $373,280 in other compensation.

The new contract can be read here.

The new contract comes one day after the union that represents journalists at the company released data showing that it paid women only 86.8 percent of what it paid men.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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  • ...and in the meantime, oversaw the evaporation of about $3 billion in investor's money. Now we know where some of that money went. We should just get rid of the inefficiency of an actual business and just have shareholders write out checks to News Corp. executives directly.

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