I should have known better. After finding stories about executive compensation at Reuters and McGraw-Hill in the past 24 hours on the Internet, I did a quick search to see if any of the other business journalism-related companies had filed a proxy statement. Dow Jones, the parent of the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s, filed its proxy on Friday afternoon with the SEC.
Except for a short Dow Jones newswire story, the proxy has gone unreported. (I did a Lexis/Nexis search and found nothing. A Google search turned up the Dow Jones brief in the Newark Star-Ledger.)
Shame on the Wall Street Journal and other business media outlets for ignoring this story, particularly since there has been a change at the top of the company announced earlier this year that was widely written about. How quickly we seem to forgot.
So here are the interesting details:
Outgoing CEO Peter Kann’s total compensation (salary, bonus, long-term incentive plan, all other compensation) in 2005 was $2.92 million, up 3.6 percent from his 2004 total compensation of $2.82 million. The biggest increase was in his bonus, which rose 10 percent to $918,500 from $835,000.
Incoming CEO Richard Zannino, who was the executive vice president and COO, saw his total compensation rise 6.6 percent to $2.0 million, from $1.88 million in 2004. His bonus also increased by 10 percent to $638,000. I could not find anything in the compensation committee report that showed what his CEO salary will be. His 2005 salary was $756,653, up about $30,000 from 2004. I would imagine that his CEO salary will be near what Kann was paid.
Zannino also receved 48,100 stock options in 2005 with a value between $1.24 million and $3.15 million.
Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger received total compensation of just more than $1 million in 2005, up 9.5 percent from the $940,589 he received in 2004. Steiger’s bonus rose $25,000, or 14.3 percent, to $200,000. His base salary was $528,327, up slightly from 2004.
Read the proxy here.
If anyone knows where else this has been reported on Saturday or Monday, please let me know. I’d like to give someone credit for writing this. I’ve done some pretty thorough searches though and came away disappointed that this story has been ignored — except for the Dow Jones wire story that ran on Friday afternoon.
I also bet there are reporters at the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and at MarketWatch — all Dow Jones subsidiaries — who are extremely interested in these details.
