USA TODAY Co., Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to the USA Today Company Q1 2026 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. 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. You may begin.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today to discuss USA Today Company's first quarter 2026 financial results. Presenting on today's call will be Mike Reed, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Tricia Gosser, Chief Financial Officer, and Kristen Roberts, President of USA Today Media. If you navigate to the USA Today Company website, you will find that we have posted an earnings supplement in addition to an earlier press release. We'll 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 that this call is being recorded. In addition, certain statements made during this call are or may be deemed to be forward-looking statements as defined under the U.S. federal securities laws, 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 our 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. Please keep in mind all comparisons are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. In addition, we will be discussing non-GAAP financial information during the call, including same-store revenues, free cash flow, total adjusted EBITDA, total adjusted EBITDA margin, segment adjusted EBITDA, segment adjusted EBITDA margin, and adjusted net income attributable to USA Today Company. You can find reconciliations of our non-GAAP measures to the most comparable US 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 offer to purchase any USA Today Company securities. The webcast and audio cast are copyrighted material of USA Today Company 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, Chairman and CEO of USA Today Company.

Thank you, Matt. Good morning, and thanks to all of you for joining our first quarter earnings call. I am pleased to report that we had an excellent start to the year. In our last call, we laid out our expected path to growth. A critical part of that strategy is improving total revenue trends through digital revenue growth. And in Q1, we saw meaningful progress on both fronts. As you will hear throughout the call this morning, our momentum continues to build, and we believe our first quarter results have set the tone for a promising 2026. Year over year, total revenue trends were a bright spot in the quarter, with same-store declines improving to less than 2%. representing our strongest performance in four years. This improvement was driven by a return to year-over-year growth in digital-only subscription revenues and continued contributions from our AI partnership agreements. As a result, total digital revenues increased 5% on a same-store basis versus Q1 of last year and accounted for 48% of total revenues, representing an all-time high. In addition to our top line momentum, we drove a marked improvement across several key financial metrics in Q1. Adjusted EBITDA increased 45% year-over-year. Net income increased $27 million over the prior year period. First lien net leverage decreased to 2.3 times, and we generated positive free cash flow in the quarter. Overall, we believe our strong execution against our most important strategic actions is leading to the results we had anticipated, and therefore, we are reaffirming our full-year business outlook. Now, with that, I would like to review the operational highlights from the first quarter. Our digital strategy continues to focus on our large organic audience, deepening engagement, and improving the revenue of each digital user on our platforms. In the first quarter, we continued to attract one of the largest digital audiences in the media industry, with 180 million average monthly unique visitors coming to our platforms, which is up slightly from 179 million in Q4. That scale, combined with our ability to stay closely aligned with our readers' preferences, drove 1.4 billion total page views per month across our digital platforms at NewsQuest, and USA Today Media. We believe our large and highly engaged audience positions us well to accelerate total digital revenue growth through highly diversified and predictable revenue streams. One area worth highlighting is our digital-only subscription business. In the first quarter, digital-only subscription revenue returned to year-over-year growth and recorded its third consecutive quarter of sequential growth We also saw continued strength in digital-only ARPU, reaching a new high and growing 43% year-over-year and 5% sequentially. Regarding digital-only subscription volumes, we are starting to see signs of stabilization. Our start-to-stop ratio is quickly approaching parity, an important inflection point, and as we sustain that trajectory, it sets the stage for sequential volume growth over time Overall, we feel really good about the progress we have made in our subscription journey. Digital-only ARPU continues to grow, and we expect that momentum to carry through the year. Volumes are stabilizing with a return to sequential growth expected in the next few quarters, and we expect digital-only subscription revenue to continue growing on a year-over-year basis. Now with that, I'll turn the call to Kristen to outline some of the exciting initiatives underway to drive monetization through the expansion of our content experiences and product portfolio. Kristen?