Lee Enterprises, Incorporated

Welcome to the Lee Enterprises 2025 first quarter webcast and conference call. The call is being recorded and will be available for replay at investors.lee.net. At the close of the planned remarks, there will be an opportunity for questions. Participants assessing this call by webcast may submit written questions through the website and then will be answered during the call. at time permits. Otherwise, you will receive a response later. A link to the live webcast can be found at investor.lee.net. Now, I'll turn the call over to your host, Jared Marks, Vice President, Finance.

Good morning. Thank you for joining us. In addition to myself, speaking on this morning's call are Kevin Mowbray, President and Chief Executive Officer, Tim Millich, Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, and Les Ottolenghi, Chief Transformation and Commercial Officer. Earlier today, we issued a news release with preliminary results for our first fiscal quarter of 2025. It is available at lee.net, as well as major financial websites. Please also refer to our earnings presentation found at investors.lee.net, which includes supplemental information. As a reminder, this morning's discussion will include forward-looking statements based on our current expectations. These statements are subject to certain risks, trends, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Such factors are described in this morning's news release and in our SEC filings. During the call, we referred to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the relevant GAAP measures are included in the tables accompanying the release. And now, to open the discussion is our President and Chief Executive Officer, Gavin Mowbray.

Good morning, everyone. Our team has made great progress driving our digital transformation forward while continuing to serve our communities with trusted, high-quality political journalism. In our last call, we shared how Lee has been leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance our digital transformation strategy. I'm excited to again have Les O'Leary, our Chief Transformation Commercial Officer, on the call today. Les will share more in a bit about how Lee is transforming we engage with our customers scale our advertising opportunities through the use of ai lee is consistently outpacing our industry peers in several important measures of digital growth both digital subscriptions and digital agency revenue digital subscription revenue grew 46 annually over the last three years nearly doubling the nearest industry tier On the advertising side, Amplified Digital Agency revenue has significantly outpaced our nearest peer, growing 33% annually for the past three years. Total digital revenue was $302 million on a trailing 12-month basis, including $102 million within Amplified Digital Agency. Our first quarter digital revenue grew 5% year over year, with each stream of digital revenue showing growth. Digital subscription revenue continued to lead strong growth, growing 14% year over year. Our digital revenue is diverse and growing, and our first quarter results puts us in a position to take advantage of the AI partnerships we've recently made. And I'd like to pass the call over to Les.