Retiring NYT Supreme Court Reporter Earned $140K a Year
Linda Greenhouse, the New York Times reporter who covered the U.S. Supreme Court for 30 years, will earn about $300,000 when she leaves the newspaper in a voluntary buyout.
The buyout is based on two years of salary—Greenhouse makes $140,000 a year—and a bonus, the New York Observer reports.
When asked to name her favorite story, Greenhouse at first declined. Then she confessed, telling the Observer it was an article she wrote under a tight deadline of 10 minutes after the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore. The networks were reporting that Al Gore had won the case, but Greenhouse quickly surmised the winner was Bush. The court issued the unusual decision at 10 p.m., and the usual summary with a vote count was not included.
“The Supreme Court effectively handed the presidential election to George W. Bush tonight, overturning the Florida Supreme Court and ruling by a vote of 5 to 4 that there could be no further counting of Florida’s disputed presidential votes,” she wrote in the story’s first paragraph.
She intends to stay busy after her retirement and has some academic work lined up. “I’m not going to disappear. I’m going to keep writing and thinking and talking about Supreme Court,” she said.
