Bob Woodward – ‘self-effacing guy’

That’s the word from Washington Post Executive Editor Len Downie said about the legendary-in-his-own-mind Woodward continuing to work for the WaPost at a buck a year as a “special asset” after taking a Post buyout.

McClatchy — just another newspaper company

Forget their in-depth, unbiased Iraq coverage. When outsourcing jobs to India is he least problematic of your newspaper job downsizing actions, you’re just another big conservative newspaper company at bottom line.

Hey may not know Mavericks hoops, but he does know CEO-ing more than Snooze

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban makes a compelling case to make CEO pay cash-only:

Make companies generate 100 percent of their compensation in cash that will be 100 percent expensable in the quarter paid.

Counteracting the “CEO as riskmeister” myth, Cuban writes:

Everyone who works for that company is at risk – of losing their jobs, benefits, raises, you name it. Employees live in the corporate cash zone, while CEOs and the top few in management live in the equity/lottery ticket zone.

Too bad an outsider like Cuban had to write something like this instead of the Dallas Morning News’ own op-ed staff

Of course, given that Bob Decherd, CEO of Belo Corp., the parent of the Snooze, got a $3 million bonus last year, despite a negatively performing company — a bonus that works out at about $60,000 per each of 50 fired editorial employees — it’s no wonder it took an outsider to write this.

The only wonder is that the Snooze even published it.

Dallas Morning News gets Jewish-Roman history wrong

The Snooze lumps Rome’s two wars against Jewish rebels with Nazi persecution of Jews in what sets a new low standard for non-political stupidity on the editorial pages of the Snooze.

The murder of 6 million European Jews in the 1940s fiercely and urgently showed why Israel was, and is, necessary. It is no small mystery, though, that the failed attempt to exterminate the Jewish people would resurrect an ancient nation murdered by Roman legions.

As I e-mailed Snooze Editorial Page Editor Keven Willey, this is totally ahistorical. First, while Rome may have provoked Jews at times, nonetheless, the Jewish people had full religious freedom in the Roman Empire before the first Jewish Revolt. That’s TOTALLY different from the Nazis going out of their way to proscribe Judaism then kill the Jewish people just for being Jews.

And, it wasn’t until after the SECOND Jewish revolt that Rome put restrictions on Jewish practices and forbade them from living in Jerusalem.

Hypocrisy alert – Bob Decherd and Belo Corp

Only eight of Dallas-Fort Worth’s 50 largest companies had both a revenue decline in 2007 from 2006 AND negative value to shareholders in 2007.

One of those was Belo Corp, parent of The Dallas Morning News.

The News has been slumping even by the standards of seven-day daily newspaper declines. (Interestingly, the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Orange County Register, two other openly conservative papers, have joined the Snooze at or near the bottom of worst-performing major dailies the last three or so years. The New York Post and Washington Times are perennial money losers.)

That did not phase the board of directors of Belo, apparently. Decherd, at $3 million, got the fifth-biggest bonus of those top-50 company CEOs. His total compensation for the year ranked 13th, at a shade over $10 million.

That $3 million bonus? What is that, about $60,000 each for the 50 or so editorial folks who have gotten the ax at the Snooze in the last three years or so?

Sorry I can’t find a link to the graphic box illustrating this that goes with the main story. I’d love to ask Pamela Yip, who wrote the main store and has seen dozens of friends and coworkers get axed over the last three years, how she felt about digging up that nugget.

If you’d like to ask her, here you go.