A few weeks ago I reported on an internal debate over education coverage at WBEZ. Should Becky Vevea, a freelancer who contributed hugely to WBEZ’s superb coverage of the 2012-’13 school year, be hired to cover education full-time? Education reporter Linda Lutton thought so. But this sort of small-scale tweaking of staff and budget was hard to sell to Chicago Public Media CEO Torey Malatia, a big-picture guy. (Vevea was eventually hired, but as a producer instead of a reporter.) A CPM spokesman told me that once the board of directors approved his new budget, Malatia would sit down with me and explain what his big picture was.
The following Monday morning, the board summoned Malatia to a meeting at Baird & Warner, home of board president Steve Baird. At the end of a week in which lawyers did what lawyers do while Malatia stayed home, CPM announced that its CEO had resigned.
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Robert Feder, who had earned a big name as a media reporter at the Sun-Times, joined Vocalo in 2009 and brought the experiment instant credibility. It didn’t come cheap. Chicago Public Media reported to the IRS (in paperwork required of all tax-exempt organizations) that in fiscal 2010 Feder was CPM’s sixth most compensated employee—making more than CFO Donna Moore, COO Alison Scholly, and certainly anybody in the WBEZ newsroom. When, long after he was gone, Feder’s compensation leaked out (the salaries were listed on public documents), WBEZ’s journalists had one more reason to shake their heads.
CPM revenues quickly recovered from the 2008 shellacking, but Malatia’s relationship with the board didn’t.
