Mary Junck
When I saw the news yesterday that Mary Junck, CEO of the newspaper chain that owns the Billings Gazette, had received another substantial bonus, I didn’t think I’d write anything.
I mean, this is the news business, right? Mary Junck getting a substantial bonus for questionable work stopped being news a couple of years ago. I was also hesitant to say anything because I don’t want the scent of sour grapes hanging over Last Best News.
As I have said before, I have few regrets about my nearly 25 years with the Gazette. The publishers and editors I worked for gave me tremendous freedom to do work I loved, surrounded me with interesting, capable colleagues and paid me enough money to have raised three happy, healthy daughters. There was even enough money left over to sustain the lives of sundry cats and dogs.
And despite what you may have heard from some press critics, I am not a militant socialist or bomb-throwing 99 percenter who wants to hang plutocrats by their toenails and scoop up the C-notes falling out of their pockets. I pledged my own shaky future to the wonders of the market economy when I launched this site a few months ago.
But I do cling to a quaint notion from my childhood (I watched a lot of “Mighty Mouse”) that a sense of fairness ought to prevail in society, that most of the time good people should be rewarded and evil-doers vanquished. And that, at the very least, a sense of shame ought to prevent people from doing very bad things in public.
Please turn your attention to Dylan Smith’s thorough analysis of Junck’s history with Lee Enterprises, going back to her decision in 2005 — the most disastrous decision in the 124-year history of that company — to buy the Pulitzer newspaper chain for $1.46 billion. If not for that fateful mistake, Lee Enterprises might well have been, down to the present day, the darling of the newspaper industry, a fat and happy holdout in a sea of sinking hulks. As it is, Lee is just another deeply indebted, layoff-happy, executive-bonus-granting media company, whose stock has declined from $49 a share in 2004 to $4.39 as of Monday.
And what did Junck do to earn her latest bonus? She helped revamp Lee’s debt load. Sure, it’s also true that in fiscal year 2013 Lee’s losses were $77.7 million, far greater than the loss of $16.3 million in 2012, but you can’t expect multiple miracles from the same person year in and year out.
It’s just a shame, a damned, crying shame, that neither Junck nor anybody on the Lee board of directors has any shame.
I should also point out that Dylan Smith, who wrote the piece referenced above, besides being the editor and publisher of TucsonSentinel.com, is chairman of the board of Local Independent Online News Publishers, or LION Publishers. I attended a LION conference in Chicago last October, when I was still laying the groundwork for Last Best News. Those three days provided just the final jolt of information, advice and inspiration I needed to get cracking. Smith is doing good work in Tucson and good work for all of us everywhere who care about independent journalism.
