Gannett Co., Inc.

and welcome to Gannett's second quarter 2024 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode, and a question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Matt Esposito, Head of Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today to discuss Gannett's second quarter 2024 financial results. Presenting on today's call will be Mike Reed, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Doug Horn, Chief Financial Officer, Kristen Roberts, Chief Content Officer, and Chris Cho, President of Digital Marketing Solutions. If you navigate to the Gannett website, you will find that we have posted an earnings supplement in addition to our earlier press release. We will be referencing it today on the call as it provides you with additional detail on this quarter's performance. Before we begin, please let me remind you this call is being recorded. In addition, certain statements made during the call are or may be deemed to be forward-looking statements, including those with respect to future results and events and are based upon current expectations. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results and events to differ materially from those discussed today. We encourage you to read the cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements in the earnings supplement, as well as the risk factors described in Gannett's filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to publicly update or correct any of the forward-looking statements made during this call. In addition, we will be discussing non-GAAP financial information during the call, including same-store revenues, free cash flow, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, and adjusted net income attributable to Gannett. You can find reconciliations of our non-GAAP measures to the most comparable U.S. GAAP measures in the Earnings Supplement. Lastly, I would like to remind you that nothing on this call constitutes an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to purchase any interest in Gannett. The webcast and audio cast are copyrighted material of Gannett and may not be duplicated, reproduced or rebroadcasted without our prior written consent. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Mike Reed, Gannett's chairman and CEO.

Thank you, Matt. Good morning and thanks for joining our second quarter earnings call. We had a strong quarter and we are excited to give you an update today. I wanted to start with some important themes. which you will hear covered throughout this morning's call. We continue to show improvement in our overall same store revenue trends and are pleased with where we are for the first six months of the year. Importantly, our improvement in total same store revenue trend was once again driven by growth across all of our key digital revenue categories as we expected. We realized adjusted EBITDA growth a quarter earlier than expected this year and We improved our balance sheet, moving firstly net leverage below two times to 1.9 times, while liquidity remained strong. Core to our operating results was our expanded monetization strategy, which produced several wins across our digital businesses during the quarter. We saw increased engagement with our large digital audience, resulting in the third consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in digital advertising. We achieved new highs in digital only subscription revenue and ARPU, and we returned to year over year growth in digital only paid subscriptions. We reached new highs in DMS core platform revenue and core platform ARPU, and we grew our partnership revenue more than 100% compared to the prior year. Our performance in the quarter, both financial and key metrics, gives us confidence that aligns with our expectations that we will see continued improvement over the back half of the year, and we are reiterating our business outlook this morning. In the second quarter, adjusted EBITDA reached approximately $75 million, up nearly 5% over the prior year. This performance is especially noteworthy given the 40% growth we experienced in the second quarter of last year. So it was great to see further progress over a very tough comp. Our adjusted EBITDA growth combined with continued optimization of our working capital also resulted in solid free cash flow generation, marking a notable increase from 2.1 in free cash flow. Save store revenue trends improved sequentially for the sixth consecutive quarter, and we believe we remain on track to hit our revenue growth inflection point as we exit this year. As those who follow us know, important to our success in 2024 is the growth of total digital revenues. In Q2, we saw continued growth in each of our digital revenue categories versus the prior year. As a result, total digital revenues increased 6.2% and now account for 44% of total revenues. All of these items I have referenced this morning, adjusted EBITDA growth, free cash flow generation, ongoing improvement in same store revenue trends, growing digital revenues, and further deleveraging are expected to continue in the second half of the year. We believe we have many opportunities ahead of us and we intend to fully capitalize on them as we continue to execute on our strategy. With that, I would like to discuss some of the operational highlights from the second quarter. Our commitment to a diversified digital strategy is expected to provide a foundation for sustainable growth. Our strategy focuses on both audience expansion and increased engagement through a personalized content experience with the goal of maximizing revenue throughout the user journey. In the second quarter, we continued to attract a significant digital audience with 185 million average monthly unique visitors to our platforms. And as a result of improved engagement with that audience, we were able to achieve double digit page view growth over the prior year. This focus on overall audience and monetization has yielded positive results across our digital businesses. A notable example of that success is our digital only subscription revenue. In Q2, digital-only subscription revenue and digital-only ARPU achieved new highs, with growth rates of at least 20% over the prior year period. The second quarter also marked the fourth consecutive quarter of sequential growth in digital-only paid subscriptions, as well as a return to year-over-year growth. We believe the solid progress across our key metrics confirms that the strategic actions we've implemented focused on customer acquisition, content and pricing have proven to be effective. We expect this revenue stream to continue to be a meaningful contributor to the expected overall digital revenue growth in the near and long term. Our penetration rates remain low and our ARPU is below market. So we see significant potential to grow through increased volumes and pricing. Couple that with the outstanding work Kristen and the content team are doing to provide high-quality journalism and broader content experiences, and we believe we have a strong value proposition for our consumers and advertisers. I'll now turn it over to Kristen to highlight some of the accomplishments from the quarter, as well as outline the strategic initiatives in motion for the second half of the year. Kristen?