Boy, was this a long time coming, and long overdue: David Carr, the NYT media columnist, points out that even as the newspaper industry has been collapsing, the executives who presided over this not only failed to suffer along with their employees, but in some cases profited handsomely from a bonus culture. Excerpt:

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.

There will be a collective whoop in newsrooms across America today when that column is read.