Saga Communications, Inc.

Thanks for holding. We appreciate your time and patience. Please stay on.

Good day and welcome to the Saga Communications Inc. third quarter earnings release and conference call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Chris Forgey, President and CEO. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Paul, and thanks to all of you who have taken the time to join Saga's Q3 earnings call. We appreciate your continued interest and participation in Saga Communications. We've got a lot to talk about today. For starters, we're pleased to report the addition of our people, resources, and renewed focus in specific opportunistic growth areas is starting to impact our revenue in a real positive way. I'm pretty certain you won't hear some of these things on other earnings calls you might be participating in over the next few days. For the quarter... National was up 1%. This is in a sector that's down in national business, double digits amongst our brethren. Digital was up 34% for the quarter and continues to grow with a great deal of headroom. And we do it differently than most. And finally, NCR, the selling of events, is up 7.7 points for the quarter. And year-to-date, national is up, ready for this, 6.9%. Interactive is up 21%, and NTR, or the selling of events, is up 11.1%. Our other areas of focus, e-commerce, which is the selling of certificates over the past trailing 12 months, has totaled $1.3 million and is still growing. We are still in the process of deploying our online news and information service in several of our saga markets and have multiple markets in queue, for installation this year and next. You may also refer to this or be familiar with this as metaphorically Clarksville now. We also continue to perform really well in targeted categories. Number one category continues to be home improvement, which includes HVAC, plumbing, roofing, insulation, invisible fence companies and things like that. And that too is still growing. Automotive has made a surge. and moves into our number two category of business. And professional services has moved to number three, which is things like aesthetic plastic surgery, cosmetic dentistry, and weight loss. So, Sam, I think they call that a tease on the air when our on-air personalities just give a little look inside. So I'm going to send it back to Sam for some more performance news.