F. Warren Hellman’s proposed Bay Area News Project will rely on the free labor of UC-Berkeley journalism students, but not everyone involved in nonprofit journalism is working for free.

The editor of Pro Publica, Paul Steiger, was paid $570,000 in 2008, according to IRS forms the nonprofit files annually.

Pro Publica is the 32-person nonprofit news service started by subprime mortgage pioneers Herbert and Marion Sandler of San Francisco and Steiger, of course, is the former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal.

The salary was first reported by Reflections of a Newsosaur blogger Alan D. Mutter. The NY Times’ Media Decoder blogger David Carr asked members of Pro Publica’s board about the salary. They defended it, saying you get what you pay for.