FIGURING OUT A SALARY MODEL
IS ONE OF A NEWSROOM START-UP’S
TOUGHEST CHALLENGES, BUT CAN
ALSO BE ONE OF ITS MOST REWARDING

When it came time to figure out how to pay our team, we began with the most basic question: “What do you want our compensation structure to achieve and avoid?”

We had everyone write their answers straight onto stickies in a Google Jamboard under two columns: Achieve and Avoid. We then asked clarifying questions and tried to get a sense of where there were throughlines of consensus without agreeing to anything.

Some of the common sentiments we heard were wanting salaries that value staff, pay transparency, caps on executive pay, and ways for staff to grow professionally and financially without managing people. Two key things we wanted to avoid was financially devaluing reporters and creating a system where the founding team earns more than future hires.

From there, we spent time as a leadership team reviewing and discussing these answers, which helped us to build an internal gauge of what we felt would make our team feel valued.

There are so many different ways you can organize structures and pay staff and an almost endless number of resources about the correct way to do it. We looked at more than two dozen models. 

These may seem unusual approaches for a newsroom, but one consulting firm, Edgility, explained perfectly why this is so important if we want to build healthier newsrooms: “The default approach to compensating talent isn’t equitable. So we can’t use the old rules and systems and expect different results. We [must] reimagine the process… to ensure decisions are grounded in your values.” 

Here are some pay structures we evaluated:

Here are some organizational structures we evaluated:

Read more from our recommended resources: SELC, Edgility, Vega Mala Consulting, RoadMap Consulting, and CompassPoint ⟶

Setting up a compensation model is one of the biggest culture-defining decisions you make as a newsroom leader. For that reason, it’s important to look back at your organizational values. 

Values can seem vague and unhelpful when setting up something as complex as compensation, so you’ll want to turn them into something more practical, like a Compensation Philosophy.

The Appeal’s core values when we began this process were transparency, real equity, self- and community care, transformational relationships, and feedback/growth. 

The first three values seemed the most relevant to how people are compensated at work, so we focused on these. As leaders, we talked through and drafted how we wanted these three values to be represented in whichever model we chose. 

Our Compensation Philosophy has six principles, each tied to one of our core values:

As thoughtful as many of different compensation models are, many don’t address some of the concerns relevant to every newsroom, particularly new ones. 

In trying to implement our Compensation Philosophy around equity, we researched whether any one-time adjustments to basic pay structures might help address some of our biggest concerns. These included:

1. Beginning Adjustments

2. Future Adjustments

Even if you don’t know for certain how pay raises and promotions will work in the future, it’s a good idea to have a couple of ideas so staff know they won’t be stuck at this one salary indefinitely.

Here are a couple of options we looked at:

Doing all the research is one thing, but putting it to use is another. As leaders, we had many, many conversations about these adjustments and what real equity looks like in practice. Should we pay more, or offer a hiring bonus, to people who have been impacted by the criminal legal system? What about people with high student loan debt? How do we account for the fact that staff will move between more and less expensive cities?

We went back to our Compensation Philosophy and, in line with this, began cutting the options down to models we felt like would support our team financially, value traditional and lived expertise, and promote equity. In the end, we had a couple of top contenders.

Then we sought out professional advice, which was critical.

Good advice will not only make sure your preferred options are legal, but a good HR professional will help refine your shortlist to be more in line with your company values and Compensation Philosophy.

We decided to propose Thriving Wages as our compensation model. It felt equitable—empowering all people with enough funds to cover their needs and wants—while being relatively straightforward to implement. 

Harmonize explains the benefits of this model well:

“A living wage is an amount of money that enables a person to take care of the basic needs of themselves and their dependents. This means housing, food, health care, rest, and other essentials. A thriving wage is an amount of money that enables a person to feel a sense of security and abundance in the present, and build toward increasing security and abundance in the future. This means having access to goods, services, and experiences that provide enjoyment, personal growth, and healing…”

So then we had to figure out, what is a Thriving Wage?

To do this, we:

From there, we had a good idea of where we wanted our salaries to fall to be able to provide a Thriving Wage in most U.S. markets.

We also chose to include two adjustments:

• Salary Cap, where the highest-paid employee can only earn 2.5X more than the lowest paid employee. The intended outcome is not to cap high-end salaries but to raise lower salaries when necessary.
• Cost of Living Adjustments are something we intend to bring in once we’re financially able.

As we’ve shared in detail by now, being a worker-led newsroom means our full team is responsible for big decisions like approving our compensation model. So, we held two working sessions to hash out details and get final approval.