TEGNA Inc

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q4 2024 Tegna, Inc. Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Kirk von Seelen, Tegnus Treasurer. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to our fourth quarter and full year 2024 conference call and webcast. My name is Kirk von Seelen, and I am Tegnus Treasurer. Today, our CEO, Mike Stibe, and our CFO, Julie Heskett, We'll review Tegna's financial performance and results and provide Tegna's full year and first quarter outlook. After that, we'll open the call for questions. Hopefully, you've had the opportunity to review this morning's press release. If you have not yet seen a copy of the release, it's available at tegna.com. Before we get started, I'd like to remind you that this conference call and webcast includes forward-looking statements, and our actual results may differ. Factors that may cause them to differ are outlined in our SEC filings. This presentation also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures. We have provided reconciliations of those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in the press release. With that, let me turn the call over to Mike.

Thanks, Kirk. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. My first six months here at Tegna, the team and I have been working closely with our stations and our business leaders to assess our operations, strategic focus, and untapped opportunities. There are a lot of exciting things happening at the company. We have strong local news teams, trusted brands, and deep ties to our communities and our local advertisers. We're building a better future for Tegna. And as I mentioned last quarter, the team and I have identified five key areas of opportunity that have urgent focus across the company. Number one, building a world-class team, culture and company operating system that unlocks high impact execution. Number two, leveraging Tegna's strengths across our stations, improving performance through better resource sharing. Number three, fully deploying technology automation and AI to run a more efficient and effective operation. Number four, growing digital revenue by deepening engagement with our digital audience. And number five, scrutinizing every dollar we spend, ensuring time and resources are maximally focused on audience and revenue growth. Today, I'd like to share some early progress we've made in each of these areas. Number one, building a high performance team and culture. We're rolling out unified values and expectations across our stations to drive a culture of rigorous performance management and ensure A-plus talent. We are elevating our best people into key roles where they can have the biggest impact. Headlining this effort, Tom Cox, our Chief Growth Officer, is expanding his role to lead our network affiliation and distribution partnerships. Tom is a strategic leader who will help strengthen the media ecosystem and ensure a bright future for local news and the communities we serve. We are also continuing to attract top-tier talent. I want to welcome Dhanusha Sivaji as our new Chief Experience Officer, owning marketing and consumer digital products. Dhanusha is a world-class brand builder who has led industry-dominant products. Notably, I worked closely with Dhanusha at The Knot, where she and the team turned the company around, achieving 95% brand awareness and a product NPS over 70. She is a winner, and we are thrilled to have her on board. And just last week, we announced the addition of news veteran Adrienne Work as our new chief content officer. Adrienne brings sharp editorial and operational expertise, a history of rapid innovation across TV and digital, and the kind of high intensity, high velocity leadership that fits perfectly with our team. We're very excited for her to join the team next month. Number two, we're improving execution through resource sharing. One example of the opportunities we see here, we recently consolidated marketing operations across our stations into a centralized team. This structure enables us to leverage cutting edge marketing technologies and best practices to execute more effective campaigns for our stations and for our advertisers. This move is contributing to the 90 to $100 million savings target that Julie will outline further in her comments. Number three, we're deploying technology to run better stations. We spent this quarter designing from the studs up the TV station of the future, using modern cloud-based technology, AI automation, virtual sets, and more. We will be piloting this in two markets in the coming quarters, and our expectation is that it will increase capabilities and operational savings across our station portfolio. Number four, winning in digital. We see a sizable revenue opportunity in engaging the large audience we already reach through digital channels. To that end, We have shipped or are in the process of shipping three pilots designed to test new engagement driving features for our local users. More important than the launches themselves, we're bringing an entrepreneurial tech startup mindset and user-driven development of new features and products to the company. It's a necessary first step in winning in digital while staying lean. Finally, number five, scrutinizing every dollar we spend. We are zero basing costs and questioning every expense. Just one example, our current office space in Tyson's Corner is larger and nicer than we need to get the job done. So we're exiting the building at the earliest opportunity and we'll be moving to a more cost-effective space. In addition, Julie and I are personally reviewing every vendor contract across the company, reducing the number of consultants, ensuring every dollar we spend is aligned with our strategic priorities. Our mission is to build a sustainable future for local news. And we're taking the necessary steps to ensure that Tegna thrives in this rapidly evolving industry. Now, I want to spend just a moment on the regulatory environment and the opportunities it potentially creates for Tegna. The regulatory landscape under new FCC leadership is evolving, and talk of M&A has increased since the presidential election and inauguration. Time will tell if deregulation occurs to the extent most are forecasting, but here's what we know. We know local broadcast is critical to our communities, that the current regulatory rules are antiquated, our consumers have infinite options, and advertisers can reach audiences online, on air, on streaming, on cable, on social media, in print, billboards, and so on. We are up against enormous unregulated tech companies like Meta and Google, leaving an uneven playing field for broadcasters. And to compete, we need the ability to get bigger and stronger. I think we at Tegna are best positioned for any outcome, with a strong balance sheet affording us optionality towards the best opportunities for value creation. If the right opportunity presents itself, we will be part of the discussion. Our job is to be efficient allocators of capital, and we will continue to make disciplined capital deployment decisions that prioritize long-term value creation. Finally, I want to take a moment and I want to congratulate KXTV in Sacramento for receiving the prestigious 2025 Alfred Dupont Columbia University Award, honoring excellence in journalism for their investigation into questionable practices in the Sacramento school system. Congratulations to investigative reporter Andy Judson, producer Sabrina Sanchez, Mike Bunnell, executive producer Gonzalo Magana, and along with photojournalists Tyler Horst, Vanessa Bozzuto, Rachel Boyoung Kim, and Xavier Yuyarte. What we do here matters, makes our communities better, holds people in power accountable, it changes laws, and it saves lives. In closing, the key focus areas I outlined and some of the early efforts are a complete transformation of how we operate as a company. There's an opportunity in us executing better and more efficiently, elevating our news products and capturing our content's full value across all our platforms. We are leaning on our strong stations and brands in the content and distribution ecosystem and are laser focused on growing digital revenue and activating technology to reduce costs across Tegna. This is going to be a big year. I appreciate the hard work on the team and I'm pleased that we have such strong assets that delivered solid 2024 results. I'll now hand it over to Julie to provide a more detailed look at our financial results.