Gannett's stock recently traded for $16.22 a share, up nearly 2% so far from yesterday -- and a full 8% over the past five trading days, Google Finance data show. That's a better performance than the broader S&P-500 index, up less than 2% during the same five-day period.
The rise adds to the fortunes of a group of 12 top executives who got hundreds of thousands of stock options from the board of directors last week. For example, Chairman and CEO Craig Dubow's stake of 480,000 options are now worth a net $585,600 on paper.
The options awarded last week by the board allow the executives to buy Gannett shares from the company for $15 a share -- the "strike price" -- no matter how high the market price goes. They may buy and then sell the shares, called "exercising" them, in four equal annual installments starting Feb. 24, 2011, newly disclosed company documents show.
This is a nice little move here. I don't see MNI and NYT doing quite as well tho, so I'm going to guess it is driven by assumptions about Olympics revenues to the NBC stations. NBC may have still lost money on the olympics, but the affiliates must have done very well. That and some Honolulu optimism now that it appears that regulators have washed their hands of trying to stop it.
ReplyDeleteIt'd be nice to think it is about some 1Q revenues visibility starting to firm up for the newspapers (the quarter is now two months old, after all), but I suspect not. . . or we'd see similar or better moves from NYT and MNI.