(It’s worth noting that Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher and chairman of The New York Times Company, and Janet Robinson, the president and chief executive, were criticized by various unions for a 2009 compensation package that cost a combined $12 million. It’s also worth noting that Mr. Sulzberger chose to forgo additional compensation in other years.)

The newspaper business is struggling, and those of us who have jobs are lucky to still have them. But how in the world could a board, any board, justify such huge payouts to media executives at a time like this? It’s not that any of them were flight risks, in need of incentive to stick out a bankruptcy. Most had no place to go, and even if they did, many would have trouble shaking off the taint of their previous tenure.

Peter Lewis, a former employee of both The Times and The Des Moines Register, which was bought and diminished by Gannett after he left the paper, ripped the Gannett bonuses on his blog, Words and Ideas, in summarizing an approach in which getting rid of jobs passes for a strategy.

“Can anyone argue that Gannett newspapers and journalism are better today, and that news consumers are better served?” he wrote.

“How did Mr. Dubow and Gannett serve the consumer?” Mr. Lewis continued. “They laid off journalists. They cut the pay of those who remained, while demanding that they work longer hours. They closed news bureaus. They slashed newsroom budgets. As revenue fell, and stock prices tanked, and product quality deteriorated, they rewarded themselves with huge pay raises and bonuses.”

Sure, he was talking about Gannett, but he could have been talking about the Tribune Company, or, come to think of it, much of the American economy, which used to make money by making things. Many newspaper companies are working hard against steep challenges to innovate into a new future, but Mr. Dubow and his team seemed content to just ride the collapse of the business.

No one, least of all me, is suggesting that running a newspaper company is a piece of cake. But the people in the industry who are content to slide people out of the back of the truck until it runs out of gas not only don’t deserve tens of millions in bonuses, they don’t deserve jobs.

The optics of the bonuses are far worse than the practical impact. Newspapers are asking their employees for shared sacrifice and their digital readers to begin paying. So, lucrative packages won’t cut it. As newspapers all over the country struggle to divine the meaning of the Occupy protests, some of the companies that own them might want to listen closely to see if there is a message there meant for them.