Wow, oh wow, did I find out some interesting although disturbing news today. As you in the newspaper industry know Freedom Communications filed bankruptcy last month. In the proceeding year prior to this move dozens of newspaper employees were laid off from the Northwest Florida Daily News and many more at Freedom papers all over the country. Most of those here were not making a whole lot over minimum wage. One of them here, laid off right before Christmas was  a woman who was just trying to support her kids and grandkids. The remaining employees at the paper were required to take a 5% cut in pay from their already paltry wages and had mandatory furloughs. Now, you can blame that on the economy or the dying off of newspapers as a whole. However, check this out the Arizona Capitol Times reported  that at least 45 Freedom executives received millions total in bonuses during the year. On the list is the publisher of the Northwest Florida Daily News who allegedly received eight of these in a year totaling $111,000. Now, I do find it hard to believe that you can receive eight MBO’s in that a year only consists of four quarters. Or that a couple of other Florida Freedom people in another gulf coast city did not receive and or turned down their MBOs and thus perhaps Tom was made a scapegoat by the company. It doesn’t matter. My point is to all of you in Freedom who got the MBO’s……I hope  you had a wonderful and prosperous year….don’t worry about the lives of your faithful employees that were ruined during a layoff so that you could get that bonus. And certainly I hope no federal authorities check into the fact that bonuses were received by top executives while those executives knew the total numbers of that business were down.

*****As a quick note, it has been discovered that Tom alone did not receive all of the $111,000. He only got a bit over $30,000 with the publisher of Destin getting just under 20k and the publisher of the Panama City News Herald with the lion’s share of 60k. *********