The Most F'd Up Bonus System Ever

FTVLive has been telling you how many Tegna station employees are not getting a holiday bonus.

In the past, Tegna handed out $1000 bonuses to their employees. But, Tegna CEO Mike Steib decided that the bonuses would go away in 2025 and be replaced by "merit based bonuses".

On the surface, that does sound like a bad idea, you work hard, you give your all, you get a bonus. You slouch and do the bare minimum, no bonus for you.

But, that was not how the Tegna bonuses went down.

Steib's merit bases bonuses were based on metrics hit by the Tegna stations. Staffers tell FTVLive that they were never told what those metrics were. A Tegna employee also posted about that same issue.

In the end, 11 of the Tegna stations seemed to meet the phantom metrics and the employees at the station got a bonus of $1500.

Steib listed the lucky 11 in a message to the Tegna staff.

Of course, this bonus method is complete bullshit.

Say you have an employee at KARE, who barely pulls their weight, is hard to work with and spends most of their time just bitching and whining.

Now, say you have another Tegna employee, working at WGRZ (Buffalo) who broke major stories, came to work prepared everyday, was a pleasure to work with and filled in when others couldn't make it to work.

Under Steib's bonus plan, the person at KARE gets $1500 bucks and the person in Buffalo gets bupkis. How is that fair? Short answer, it's NOT.

Obviously, the "metrics" to get bonuses were based on money that the station brought in. The news department could be awesome and breaking big stories on a daily basis. But, if the sales people suck, the folks in news are screwed.

I would argue that Steid's bonus plane is worse than no bonuses at all across the board.

This is what happens when you take a guy that has no clue how local television works and make him a CEO. But, hey, he did gut stations and is getting Nexstar to over pay for some stations, so I'm sure the Tegna board is happy.

Steib hopped on a video call with employees and let's just say that the staff was not impressed.

Tegna HR jumped in to congratulate the "top 11 stations"

The rest of you guys suck

There is no doubt that Tegna is a poorly run company, but after seeing this, they are worse than even I thought they were.

Shame on Tegna.