New York Times Company (The)

Good morning and welcome to the New York Times Company's second 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. Harlan Toplitsky, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Harlan Toplitsky, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Harlan Toplitsky, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Harlan Toplitsky, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Harlan Toplitsky, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you and welcome to the New York Times Company's second quarter 2020 earnings conference call. On the call today, we have Marc Thompson, President and Chief Executive Officer, Meredith Kopit Levien, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, and Roland 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 as updated in subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. In addition, our presentation will include non-GAAP financial measures and we have provided reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures In 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. Good morning and goodbye, because as everyone on the line must know by now, this is not just my 35th quarterly earnings call as chief executive of the Times, but also my last. Meredith takes the helm in just a few weeks' time. Which is great news for the company and its shareholders. She's a unique talent and will be a bold and brilliant CEO. But one of the changes it's going to bring is to the language Times executives use on these calls. Let's take the word lumpiness, a rather fine expressive word useful in so many contexts, but never more so than when applied to advertising. Now I've tried, God knows I've tried, to coach Meredith in the use of the word lumpiness. But frankly, it's hopeless. It turns out that unless you've spent decades steeped in true gnarly and above all British lumpiness, you just can't pronounce it with any conviction. Roland, needless to say, is a lost cause. So no more lumpiness. Indeed, no more Queen's English at all. From now on, it's all going to be in American. To paraphrase George III in Hamilton, good luck with that. But I do want to thank all of you, and particularly our analysts, for your engagement and courtesy to me over the past eight years. Your testing of the company's strategy and performance has helped us improve both, and as someone new to the public markets when I arrived in 2012, I've learned a lot from you. I also hope you'll forgive me, before I hand over to Meredith and Roland to tell the story of the quarter, if I say that it's a source of some pride to me that my last full quarter as CEO of The Times was not only our best ever for new digital subscriptions, but the quarter in which total digital revenue exceeded print for the first time. Now this has taken its time coming, not because we've been slower than others to execute our digital strategy, quite the contrary, but because our great print platform has remained so resilient. But it's clearly a watershed moment in the transformation of the times. In revenue now, as in everything else, we are a digital first company, and won't look back from here. The story of the New York Times over this period is partly a complex saga of new digital tactics, new skills, new structures and processes. But it's also a very simple story of a shared belief across the organization in the value and power of great journalism. The packaging and selling is important, of course, and we've made great strides in both. But the secret source is the journalism itself. It's the critical element in the virtuous circle of audience engagement, subscription, and long-term loyal retention. And it's also the point of the New York Times. That's why we've invested in it so consistently in recent years. Nothing gratifies me more about my years at the company than the fact that in such a difficult moment for journalism as a whole, our newsroom is so strong, and at a time when the public needs great journalism more than ever, They can rely on the New York Times. But let me hand over now to Meredith, who's played such a major part in all these successes and who I will believe will take this company to even greater heights to take you through the quarter. Meredith.