New York Times Company (The)

Good morning and welcome to the New York Times Company's first quarter 2020 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Harlan Toplitsky, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you and welcome to the New York Times Company's first quarter 2020 earnings conference call. On the call today, we have Mark Thompson, President and Chief Executive Officer, Meredith Kopit Levien, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, and Rolig Caputo, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that management will make forward-looking statements during the course of this call, and our actual results could differ materially. Some of the risks and uncertainties that could impact our business are included in our 2019 10-K. In addition, our presentation will include non-GAAP financial measures, and we have provided reconfigurations to the most comparable GAAP measures, and our earnings press release, which is available on our website at investors.nytco.com. With that, I will turn the call over to Mark Thompson.

Thanks, Harlan, and good morning, everyone. I'll start with a few high-level observations about the corona pandemic. I'll then ask my colleagues Meredith and Roland to go through the quarter in detail. Today, you're going to hear a broadly encouraging story about how the Times is performing so far during the pandemic. C.F.A. C.F.A. And though we're doing everything we can to keep them safe, they're running some of the same risks as frontline healthcare professionals. Our thoughts are never far from them or from the patients and health workers they're covering. We're incredibly grateful to them and indeed to all of our colleagues who are working around the clock and overcoming any number of obstacles to keep this great newspaper strong and able to service readers everywhere at a time when those readers need it most. C.F.A. Patience, responsiveness, flexibility, and resilience will all be key over the coming quarters. Our response to the crisis has so far been effective. We tracked the impact of the virus from the moment our reporters arrived on the ground in Wuhan to cover the first outbreak. We moved to home working in the initial wave of U.S. companies in the first half of March. Our previous home working drills and overall business continuity planning C.F.A. C.F.A. But we're also being realistic. Yesterday we told colleagues that we don't expect the majority of them to return to the office until 8 September at the earliest. Their health and safety will always be paramount to us. Given the current effectiveness of our remote working, we do not believe that this decision will have any significant impact on business results. Our digital transformation has succeeded so far because we've maintained the momentum of change year in and year out over many years now. We're determined not to allow the present disruption to reduce this momentum. As you'll hear, lower ad revenue will put pressure on profitability for some time. To mitigate that, we'll cut costs where we can, but only in ways we believe will not slow down the execution of our strategy. These cost reductions will likely lead to some job losses in the coming months, though we expect a comparatively small number of these. We expect no such job reductions in journalism and none that would impact our core growth strategy. We will continue to invest in that strategy and to hire both in journalism and in engineering, data, and the other digital product functions. We expect the company's net headcount to increase rather than decrease by year's end. This is clearly a strange, unsettling time for everyone. But this week we do have some things to celebrate at the Times. Once again, the work of our brilliant Germans has been celebrated with a clutch of Pulitzers. Meredith will give you the details of those in a moment. And thanks to the amazing surge of new subscribers, The New York Times has passed some significant new milestones. By the end of April 2020, in other words, including the first month of the present quarter, we had more than 4 million subscribers to our digital news product, more than 5 million digital-only subscriptions in all, and more than 6 million total subscriptions across digital and print, all historic highs both for this company and for the entire American news business. But now let me hand over to Meredith for a full review of Q1 and our assessment of our prospects going forward.