Staff and laid-off journalists at LAist, one of National Public Radio’s most prominent news stations, voiced outrage on Wednesday that layoffs cut 12% of jobs at the organization, while former CEOs raked in over $500,000 per year as recently as 2021.
According to tax records for 2021, former SCPR President and CEO Bill Davis earned $583,356 in total compensation ($549,669 as a W2 employee and additional payments of $33,677) while retired. He was listed on the return as working “0.00” hours per week.
Another former executive, Jon McTaggart, listed as the former CEO of APMG (American Public Media Group), earned a total of $558,767.00 for working part-time. That same year LAist reported $42 million in revenue, mostly from donations, about the same as the previous year.
In a text, Davis told TheWrap he is “not involved and not on the payroll” anymore.
A representative for SCPR declined to say confirm if the two former executives continued getting paid beyond 2021.
Amid news of the Tuesday layoffs, which eliminated 21 of the organization’s 175 positions including prominent journalists like podcaster Erick Galindo, reporter Josie Huang noted that the cuts were “especially painful coming after our union challenged the wisdom behind executive compensation, which included paying a former CEO $500,000 per year for multiple years.”
Davis previously served as President and CEO of SCPR, which owns and operates the LAist website, LAist Studios and local radio station, from 2001 and 2019. When CEO Herb Scannell took over the company, Davis shifted to President Emeritus from February 2019 to January 2022, per his LinkedIn, and continued to earn over $500,000 a year until 2022.
In fiscal year 2020, despite working an average of five hours per week in his role, Davis took home just over $500,000 — higher than his 2021 compensation — totaled from $467,647 in reportable compensation and $32,396 in estimated other compensation, according to the filing. In 2019, when Davis worked briefly as CEO before Scannell took the reins on Jan. 23, 2019, Davis took home $551,680 in total reportable income and an additional $31,934 in estimated other compensation — totaling to $583,614 — as he worked an average of five hours per week.
According to an individual with knowledge of Davis’ role during his time as President Emeritus, which Davis is still listed as on the company’s website, Davis appeared in the office to ensure a smooth transition for Scannell to CEO and helped connect Scannell to donors with whom Davis shared a personal relationship.
It is less clear what role McTaggart played for his outsized compensation. APMG is the parent company of LAist and American Public Media. The executive stepped down from his position in 2020 on the same day a group of Minnesota Public Radio and APM employees wrote an open letter to listeners and audiences describing a lack of faith in leadership and saying the company had “fostered a harmful working environment for women and journalists of color” over its 53-year history.
An SCPR spokesperson told TheWrap that “the compensation for Jon McTaggart, who retired as CEO of APMG in August 2021, does not affect SCPR revenue or expense in any way.” The spokesperson declined to give any further context for this statement.
A spokesperson for the LAist SAG-AFTRA unit referred TheWrap to the union’s statement from Tuesday following news of the layoffs, which expressed “outrage” at the cuts which do “not make sense.”
“For months, we have heard about how the company was able to manage our budget shortfall,” the statement read. “In our last pledge drive, we hit our benchmark. Our company says the ‘restructuring’ will help us become more ‘cross-platform’ and be more of a digital newsroom — yet valuable colleagues in podcasts and digital teams are being laid off. We’ve also lost people who were invaluable in getting reporting across these platforms. Management’s decision to cut 10% of staff does not make sense, and we will seek to ensure our unit colleagues are properly supported in a way that reflects their years of service.”
Although Scannell cited Tuesday’s layoffs as a result of a shortage of “a couple of million dollars” in advertising, the tax filings suggests that the company’s advertising only generated $1.03 million in 2021, while donations and grants totaled $41 million.
In addition to the revenue shortfall, job cuts were prompted by “the need to reallocate resources to transform our organization into a truly cross-platform entity,” per a SCPR spokesperson.
For Erick Galindo, whose job was cut Tuesday nine weeks into co-hosting the second season of his podcast “Wild,” he lamented the dismissal of a key Latino voice on the network. His podcast was downloaded by about a half-million listeners in its first season, he told TheWrap.
“I don’t think companies are taking the long road,” he said. “In this country, we [Latinos] are a growing demographic that still buys houses, still goes to the movies, still shops at the mall. Companies and corporations talk about like, this death of the American dream – they’re f—ing ignoring us.”
Like other NPR stations, LAist has publicly committed to much greater diversity in a city that is nearly 50% Latino. Indeed, the station’s 990 tax return in 2021 stated: “SCPR continues to make significant efforts to improve the ethnic diversity of our staff.” The return noted that the non-profit had adopted a plan “designed to fundamentally improve the level of diversity, equity and inclusion across the organization.”
Another laid-off staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity shared frustration of being impacted by the layoffs as the company moves to source a digital newsroom.
“They’ve been saying that at least since around 2010, they’re going to shift to being a digital-first newsroom,” the ex-staffer told TheWrap. “They’ve made so many efforts to become digital-first, but it always seems like they come back to radio being the centering force of the institution.”
LAist 89.3, formerly known as KPCC, is the largest NPR station in southern California, according to Nielsen ratings. It averages a weekly listenership of 600,000, while LAist.com currently averages 1.2 million monthly page views, according to SCPR records.
This article was updated to reflect comments from an SCPR spokesperson.