New York Times Company (The)

Good morning and welcome to the New York Times Company's first quarter 2026 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 Anthony DiClemente, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome to the New York Times Company's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. On the call today, we have Meredith Kopit-Levian, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Will Bardeen, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that we will be making forward-looking statements. including about our business, strategy, and performance based on our current expectations. Our actual results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties described in the company's 10-K and subsequent SEC filings. We'll also be referencing non-GAAP financial measures for which there are reconciliations to GAAP measures in our earnings release at investors.mytco.com. And with that, I will turn the call over to Meredith.

Thanks, Anthony, and good morning, everyone. Q1 was another great quarter for The Times. We continued to see strong demand for the uncompromised journalism and premium lifestyle content that The Times is uniquely capable of delivering. We're able to meet that demand despite operating in a media environment dominated by a small number of tech companies. whose moves continue to impact trafficked publishers. The Times isn't immune to that impact, but we also see real opportunity. We have a clear strategy and enduring advantages that we believe position us well for long-term growth. Let me remind you of those advantages. First, we've deliberately chosen to operate in big spaces with lots of running room ahead. Independent news coverage is a universal need, and our lifestyle products each address large global markets. Today, we reach many tens of millions of people every week across our portfolio, and we see the opportunity to directly and deeply engage many tens of millions more. Second, we've built an unparalleled engine for creating original reporting and high-quality content in a rigorous, journalistic way. Doing reporting like this at scale and across a broad range of topics essential to people's lives is hard. As others do less of it, the Times continues to invest, which makes our news coverage and our lifestyle products increasingly rare and increasingly valuable. The Pulitzers awarded earlier this week were another indication of that value and saw the Times honored in multiple categories, including investigative reporting, breaking news photography, and opinion writing. A deeply reported podcast from the Athletics Network was also honored for the first time. Third, we know how to harness technology to continually improve how we reach and engage audiences through innovations in our formats, features, product experiences, and proprietary data sets. Finally, we're able to monetize consistently high audience engagement through our multi-revenue stream model, which positions the times for healthy, long-term growth. We believe these four advantages are durable ones, and we're confident they'll enable us to continue building a larger and a more profitable company for many years to come. Now let me share a few highlights from the quarter. Digital subscription revenues grew 16% and we added 310,000 net new digital subscribers. That brings our total subscriber base to over 13 million and puts us further down the path to our next milestone of 15 million and beyond. Subscriber growth in the quarter was driven by multiple products across our portfolio. Digital advertising grew 32% in the quarter. This performance exceeded our expectations and was the result of a clear strategy, capable execution, strong marketer demand, and high engagement across the portfolio. Affiliate, licensing, and other revenues also grew in the quarter. Finally, we stayed disciplined on costs while making focused strategic investments into our journalism and product experiences, including video, which we expect to underpin our long-term success and strong market position. Before I'll wrap, I'll note that we've made progress against all of our priorities year to date. We continue to cover the world's most important stories from every angle. Journalists around the globe reported on the Iran War and its fallout, unpacking the military strategies along the Strait of Hormuz, the political calculations in Washington, Tehran, and Jerusalem, and the economic implications for Americans. We brought people aboard the inspirational voyage of Artemis II with interactive graphics and video. And we published the result of a five-year investigation into misconduct by civil rights icon Cesar Chavez, the kind of patient, public-minded work that few can do like the Times. We presented our journalism and lifestyle products in an increasing array of formats, especially video, where we see an opportunity to better engage current audiences and bring millions of new people into the Times' orbit. Our signature reporting now regularly comes to life in reporter videos, from John Carreyrou's journey to unmask the Bitcoin creator to climate reporter Raymond Zong's two-month expedition to Antarctica. We're continuing to scale output here and more than doubled production of reporter video in the first quarter. We also continue to drive real impact with our trademarks visual investigations, which in the first quarter examined the U.S.' 's role in the bombing of an elementary school in southern Iran. We also added value in every part of our portfolio in the form of new and expanded shows, features, coverage, and more. In Q1, we officially launched our first multiplayer game called Crossplay. We added a regular Sunday edition of The Daily focused on culture and debuted a new true crime podcast from Serial. The Athletic released the latest edition of its authoritative NFL draft guide, The Beast. And just last week, we convened an illustrious group of music industry leaders to name the 30 greatest living American songwriters in a multimedia package that included a rare interview with Taylor Swift, among others. Continuing to execute against these priorities is how we plan to get millions more people to have direct relationships and daily habits with the New York Times. And as we do that, we expect 2026 to be another year of revenue growth, AOP growth, margin expansion, and strong free cash flow. And with that, I'll turn it over to Will.