WQED Multimedia President and Chief Executive Officer George Miles is taking a 30 percent pay cut, one of a series of cost-cutting steps the company announced yesterday.

Earlier this week, Mr. Miles was criticized by the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy, which said that he should take a pay cut to help the company's financial situation in the current economic climate.

According to the financial report presented to the board during the company's quarterly meeting yesterday, WQED has a $734,000 operating loss for the first five months of the 2009 fiscal year.

During the meeting, WQED officials outlined recent moves the company has made to weather the recession.

"A lot of folks are uninformed about what we're doing" to keep costs down, Mr. Miles said. "People said we've done nothing. Some folks were saying we shouldn't be asking for additional money because we hadn't cut our expenses. That's not true."

Last summer, they put together what he termed a "hunker down" budget designed to weather the storm. "Then it was just a storm. Now it feels like a tsunami," he said. Because of the continuing recession, WQED implemented a series of cost-cutting moves in December 2008.

His annual salary has been cut by 30 percent -- from $306,000 to $214,200. Six other top management executives took pay cuts ranging from 20 percent to 26 percent.

Other cost-cutting measures including salary freezes for other employees, suspending contributions to employee retirement plans and increasing employee-paid health care premiums.

A newly negotiated union contract with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 820 also has helped to trim costs, Mr. Miles said.

"Our goal is to navigate through this tough economy and to be stronger going into fiscal year 2010," Mr. Miles said.

Mr. Miles declined to say whether more cuts are in the works.

"For me to stand up and say it's not going to happen would be irresponsible. We just don't know what the economy is going to bring. I pray every single day that we've hit bottom. If we've hit bottom, that's a very positive thing. We don't know what the state's going to do. We don't know the effect on the foundation community."

Pennsylvania's public television stations also face funding cuts proposed by Gov. Ed Rendell, which could amount to a loss of $1.1 million in state support for WQED-TV. The proposed state budget eliminates all funding -- $7.9 million statewide -- for station operations, and would also reduce funding for technical support. The cuts would affect eight public TV stations in Pennsylvania, including WQED.

Without state support, "WQED could become a very different place -- a shadow of itself," WQED board chairman Richard Stover told board members yesterday.

WQED recently sent out an e-mail to supporters and the local community, asking them to contact the governor and their state representatives and urge them to leave some of the state funding intact. A copy is on the station Web site, along with links for contacting state lawmakers.

The station is highly dependent on support from individuals and government sources. In 2008, WQED's largest sources of revenue were contributions and government grants, with each accounting for 23 percent.

The company is forecasting that it will be in the black -- by around $100,000 -- by the end of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.

Mr. Miles also addressed questions that have been raised over his salary and remuneration from the corporate boards he sits on.

In addition to his WQED salary, Mr. Miles earns around $800,000 a year in compensation from the five corporate boards he serves on. They include AIG, which was widely criticized for paying executive bonuses after getting a massive government bailout, along with Harley Davidson, HAFF, Equitable Resources and Wesco.

Mr. Miles declined to talk about the AIG situation, saying that he was a board member and not a company spokesman. But he defended his outside work, and said the time he spends attending meetings doesn't interfere with his work at WQED. He said the WQED board chairs and committee members knew of his outside activities and had approved them, although he acknowledged that maybe some of the newer board members weren't aware of them.

"I've always been an extracurricular person, whether it was in school and all my jobs over the years. I started at WQED when it was at its worst, when it was on the verge of bankruptcy," he said.