Former New York Times CEO Janet Robinson’s multimillion-dollar severance package included a $4.5 million payment for a one-year consulting gig.

Footnoted.com has now dug into the numbers and learned that the consulting contract states that she won’t be “required to provide more than 15 hours of such services or assistance in any month.”

The contract doesn’t stipulate a minimum amount of work. “So if the Times never calls Robinson, she simply gets the $4.5 million. If it does call her and she ends up consulting for 15 hours a month, that’s an effective rate of $375,000 a month, or $25,000 per hour,” Footnoted says. She’s also due a bonus, which could bring her total exit package to $21 million.

Two anchors in small-town Oregon are losing their jobs as their parent station is eliminating their positions, the (Douglas County, Ore.) News-Review reports.

Dan Bain, who has anchored the evening news on KPIC in Roseburg, Ore., for 20 years, will lose his job March 9, along with Tim Novotny, of KCBY in Coos Bay, Ore.

Parent company Fisher Broadcasting is planning to shut down the anchor desks at both stations, and instead staff KPIC and KCBY with reporters only—no anchors or news directors.

The reporters will submit their stories to parent station KVAL in Eugene, Ore., and anchors there will present them.

“We hope what we’re doing will enhance our news operations,” general manager Greg Raschio told the News-Review.

Bain received word two weeks ago that his contract wouldn’t be renewed; that meeting came, the News-Review said, just days after newspaper personnel chatted with Bain while he was filming a story at the paper. During that discussion, Bain, 61, said he planned to keep working at KPIC until he was 65.

Jim Asendio, news director at D.C.’s WAMU-FM, resigned Tuesday over a station-sponsored event for donors in which journalists were expected to attend.

“I do not believe that reporters should be exposed to the real or perceived influence of individuals or foundations who fund the work of the newsroom,” he said in a message posted to Washingtonpost.com, and obtained by columnist Richard Prince.

Asendio told Prince that after he raised his objections to WAMU’s general manager, he received the following email: “Understand that your refusal to participate in a major station event involves a permanent, irreversible statement to me, about whether you are part of my team.”

The station’s development office had scheduled a breakfast for this morning for 30 people, with a panel of nine reporters and producers speaking. “Allowing people to see the impact that their investment makes in our work is completely appropriate. However, the station does not permit crossing the line between a funder seeing that impact and a funder being allowed input into the planning process for coverage,” a spokesperson told Prince.

Asendio said he believed the event reminiscent of a canceled plan developed at the Washington Post by publisher Katharine Weymouth in 2009. The Post had sent out brochures offering sponsorships for an “exclusive Washington Post salon” at Weymouth’s home, promising off-the-record dinners with reporters.

This powerhouse editor has five successful mag stints under her belt, and The Hollywood Reporter marks a successful number six. So what does Janice Min believe is the key to success?

“A lot of it is making yourself indispensable to somebody or the organization. Honestly, it has nothing to do with titles or where you are. Everyone should try to find ways to be distinctive and valuable in an office and without being annoying,” she said in our So, What Do You Do? interview.

And she’s got some advice for those ambitious Millennials who often think a top executive position is their birthright.

“When [interviewees] say ‘I want to be an editor-in-chief one day,’ it’s such a turn-off. Immediately in your mind you’re like, ‘OK, this is someone who feels entitled who is not goig to want to work very hard.’”

Read more in So What Do You Do, Janice Min, Editorial Director of The Hollywood Reporter?

Raju Narisetti is leaving The Washington Post for the Wall Street Journal.

He starts at the WSJ Feb. 15 as managing editor of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network (wsj.com, SmartMoney.com and MarketWatch) and deputy managing editor of the Journal. He succeeds Kevin Delaney, who departed the WSJ yesterday for a job managing The Atlantic’s soon-to-launch business brand.

According to Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli, Narisetti’s tenure was marked by his “provid[ing] much of the vision and strategy that enabled The Post to become one of the most innovative and successful digital-news operations anywhere.”

Narisetti joined the Post in 2008. His last day will be Feb. 1.

The Associated Press has opened a bureau in Pyongyang, North Korea, becoming the first international news organization to have a full-time presence in the country.

The office is located inside “the headquarters of the state-run Korean Central News Agency in downtown Pyongyang,” the AP says.

The bureau is staffed by two natives, reporter Pak Won Il and photographer Kim Kwang Hyon, who reported for AP in recent weeks on Kim Jong Il’s funeral. Supervising Pak and Kim will be Korea Bureau Chief Jean H. Lee and Chief Asia Photographer David Guttenfelder, who will apparently not be based in Pyongyang but will “make frequent trips to … manage the office, train the local journalists and conduct their own reporting.”

At a ceremony yesterday officially opening the bureau, AP president and CEO Tom Curley said: “Everyone at The Associated Press takes his or her responsibilities of a free and fair press with utmost seriousness. We pledge to do our best to reflect accurately the people of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as well as what they do and say.”

This will be interesting, to say the least.

Five hires at Bloomberg View, the financial news org’s opinion and editorial arm, Talking Biz News reports.

Those five hires are:

• Katy Roberts, previously Week In Review editor at the New York Times
• James Gibney, former features editor at The Atlantic
• Michael Newman, former politics editor at Slate
• Deborah Solomon, former economic policy reporter from The Wall Street Journal
• Marc Champion, also formerly of the WSJ (as Istanbul bureau chief)

.

All five will be members of the editorial board, which means they will “write and review editorials and columns and commission op-ed articles for the overall section.”

Awesome “as told to” in the January issue of the Washingtonian about how Dave Statter, a traffic reporter, became a news reporter first for radio station WTOP and then TV station WUSA, both in Washington DC.

Statter had just been let go from his traffic reporting job and was holed up in his condo. He was listening to the police scanner, a holdout from his days as a firefighter, when he heard about a plane crash.

This crash turned out to be Air Florida Flight 90, which had crashed into DC’s 14th Street Bridge on takeoff.

Statter says: “I called the WTOP newsroom and said, ‘Look, you don’t know me, but there’s been a plane crash at the 14th Street Bridge.’”

He was able to talk his way into a nearby hotel:

I was just walking up the hallway and there was a door open and I knocked on it. I looked in and they were all outside on the balcony watching. I said, “I want to do a radio report. Can I use your phone and stand on the balcony?”

I stood in the freezing cold, with my binoculars in one hand and the phone in the other, and gave WTOP live reports. I’d done some radio when I was in college and worked as a disk jockey in southern Maryland, but I’d never been a reporter for a radio station in a major market. This was my audition.

I was too stunned to be nervous. I could not believe there was a commercial plane between the bridges, in the river. I could see the helicopter swooping down, and I tried to make out what was going on with the rescues. I could see the damaged cars on the bridge. I just started talking, describing what I saw.

The next day, they said they needed an extra traffic reporter. “I walked in, got a tape recorder and car, and they said, ‘Here’s the keys. We’ll fill out the paperwork later.’ By Friday they said, ‘Would you like a full-time job?’”

Bill Harris, who worked at Flint, Mich.’s WJRT-12 for 34 years, is done with them, he told Mlive.

After his contract was not renewed in April, he was asked to come back to the station to work on some special projects. Those projects are now over, and he confirms to Mlive that “the marriage wasn’t perfect,” so he’s done.

“My vision for what I want to do … didn’t mesh with (the work at) ABC12,” he said.

He has had ongoing conversations with rival stations WNEM-5 (CBS) and WEYI-25 (NBC) since summer, and may join one of them as soon as January.

Harris is a four-time Emmy winner and a viewer favorite if this Facebook post is anything to go by.

Modern technology is great. It’s allowing cartoonist David Horsey, recently hired by the Los Angeles Times, to remain in Seattle, SeattleWeekly reports.

His new gig, which begins Jan 1: “recrafting” the newspaper’s Top of the Ticket political blog, with “some combination every day of words and pictures.”

Since Top of the Ticket covers national politics, it apparently isn’t strictly necessary for Horsey to be in town.

He did offer to relocate, though. After his bosses said he could stay in Seattle, he responded: “how about in the winter months then?”

See, it’s funny because it’s rainy in Seattle.

But hey, as the Weekly puts it, this is kind of a dream job. Interesting work and you don’t have to move. Cool.