The resignation of Cyrus Freidheim comes at a particularly bad time for the Sun-Times Media Group. It is difficult to see a way out for the company. I come at this from an operations view. The situation that I'm seeing is that the company had $99 million in cash on September 30, 2008. Since then, the economic problems have worsened and the company has had a setback due to the decision of an arbitrator in a disagreement with CanWest, the Canadian publisher, about the sale of newspapers that happened during the reign of Conrad Black.

I assume that the cash burn rate for the company, which has averaged about $14-15 million a quarter, is unchanged. That is due to the cost cutting that helped, but also the deteriorating financial condition of the country which hurt the sale of advertising at the company's newspapers.

If I'm correct, the current cash on hand at the STMG is probably in the area of $80 million. That's today. Plus, the arbitrator decided the company owed more than it had put aside for relief of the CanWest deal, it will need to dive into cash for about another $13 million Canadian, plus any interest and costs. The exchange rate is moving pretty fast, but we could sum up this decision as costing the company an addition $10 million USD from cash at a minimum.

In other words, assuming all this is correct, the company has about $70 million available to operate. It is burning cash at the rate of about $5 million a month. That's roughly 14 months left to live unless something happens.

Freidheim is out. Now word comes that Jeremy Halbreich doesn't want to be the CEO and Rick Surkamer looks damaged. Where is the plan of the dissident shareholders? Who is in charge over there?