Freedom Forum Sucks Journalism Dry With $1.4 Million Bonuses

The Freedom Forum is a nonpartisan, international foundation dedicated to the promotion of free speech, and its Newseum, in Washington D.C., chronicles five centuries of news history.

Yet while journalism flounders to stay in the black, executives at the Freedom Forum are raking in the big bucks. According to a blog post written yesterday by Jim Hopkins–a former USA Today reporter who now writes the Gannett Blog–the Freedom Forum paid a total of $1.4 million in bonuses to top employees in 2008. Chairman and CEO Charles Overby received a compensation package that totaled $991,044. The president, Peter Pritchard, got $665,927.

The average salary for a journalist with 20 years experience? $77,000. Maximum.

Though the comment thread on that post devolved into an argument about the relevancy of Freedom Forum and Hopkin’s blog, a few readers managed to highlight the real irony in the fact that the Freedom Forum doles out massive compensation while the news–their entire mission–faces a shaky economic trajectory. Even the foundation’s endowment dive-bombed in ’08, suffering “multimillion-dollar losses” and beginning a series of layoffs at the Newseum that stretched into 2009.

Hopkins calls the Freedom Forum a nonprofit. Its website simply claims nonpartisan. Either way, those bonuses are ridiculous. If the Freedom Forum wants to stock the Newseum with something more than artifacts, they may want to start directing some of those bonuses towards saving the news.

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