More proof that nothing succeeds like failure in the media. Two days after we learned that Charles Allen got a £5.4m payoff for overseeing ITV's decline we discover that Sly Bailey, ceo with Trinity-Mirror, notched up a pay rise of almost 50% last year. Her pay package amounted to £1.47m and included a £755,000 bonus. A bonus for what? For deciding that her company wasn't good enough at running its regional newspapers well enough to keep them all in its stable? For failing to invest adequate resources in the company's national newspapers? For allowing the Scottish newspapers to stand by and watch their rivals surpass them? For deciding to sell off one of the company's genuine market leaders, the Racing Post?
It is sickening to see someone rewarded for such gross failures, especially in the light of so much effort by editors such as the Daily Mirror's Richard Wallace and the Sunday Mirror's Tina Weaver and their ever-decreasing staffs of journalists. Will Wallace and his team be suitably rewarded for winning four press awards and coming very close, so I'm informed, to taking the top prize of newspaper of the year? Don't bet on it.
The Trinity-Mirror board don't care about journalism. They look at bottom lines, not headlines. They want to please the scribblers in the City, not the scribblers on their staff. They seek to make investors, rather than readers, happy.
Note also the pay raises for T-M's finance director, Vijay Vaghela, and the group legal director, Paul Vickers, who received £811,000 and £626,000 respectively. Please note: I say received rather than earned.
The whole thing stinks. Even in the dark days of the Mirror group's past, under the lack-lustre stewardship of IPC and the crazy years of Robert Maxwell, the journalists were feted for their work and were not treated as shabbily as in these cost-cutting times. Then again, Maxwell did live off the company's fat, didn't he? I'll leave you to decide if there are any similarities with today's lot.
