Changes at the Tribune Company

From what I’m hearing, from several sources, all forty Tribune Company executives will be departing the company within the next few weeks, so last Friday’s visit with David Hiller may have been a farewell. But before you start to feel sorry for them, they will all be walking with bags of cash from the free stocks they awarded themselves on February 14th, 2007 and the golden parachute of $269,000,000 million they will be passing out to one another for Christmas.

As one Tribune boss put it “The executives earned a great deal of money for the company”, which may or may not be true? Which leads me to my poor math skills, how do you bring the value of a $20 billion dollar company to $8 billion dollars, and reward yourself with such hansom severance packages? I’m having trouble figuring this out, but I’m not very good with numbers, so I’ll assume the executives have done a great job.