Douglas E. Horne
Thank you, Mike, and good morning, everyone. As Mike mentioned, we are very pleased by our business momentum and the progress we made in the first quarter, which is evident in our financial results. Before going through the details, I want to highlight that we have modified our revenue presentation and our financial reports to better align with how we look at the business and internally manage our revenue streams. Our updated revenue breakdown consists of 2 main categories; total digital revenues and print and commercial revenues. Digital revenues include digitally served advertising, marketing services, subscription, and other, which includes syndication, affiliate partnership, and licensing. Print and commercial revenues include print advertising, print circulation, as well as commercial and other. We believe this revised format provides greater transparency into our evolving business model, the performance of our digital businesses, and the key components we believe are needed to drive our achievement of the revenue growth inflection point we expect as we exit 2024. Let's move to our consolidated results. Please keep in mind all comparisons are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. For Q1, total operating revenues were $635.8 million, a decrease of 5%. This represents a 340 basis point improvement from Q4 revenue trends, marking 5 consecutive quarters of top-line trend improvement. The strength in revenue was primarily driven by the expansion of our digital revenues, which demonstrated robust growth compared to the prior year. Adjusted EBITDA totaled $57.6 million in the first quarter. Adjusted EBITDA margin in Q1 was 9.1% and relatively unchanged from the prior year. While adjusted EBITDA declined as we had forecasted, our year-over-year trend saw sequential improvement, and we are planning for a return to growth in the second half of the year driven by continued improvement in revenue trends, as well as prudent cost management. Expense management remains a key piece of our success story. And in Q1, our adjusted operating expenses declined compared to the prior year. On the bottom line, we ended the first quarter with a net loss of $84.8 million and an adjusted net loss of $36.4 million. Our net loss reflects the expected $46 million asset impairment associated with the company's exit from its leased McLean, Virginia facility. It's important to note, however, that this does not impact our free cash flow. Digital revenues in Q1 were $267.5 million, up 8.1%, representing the fourth consecutive quarter of growth. Within digital revenues, digital advertising grew 5.3% in Q1 due to solid performance in our programmatic business, fueled by the increase in platform page views, as well as rebounding CPMs. Our digital-only subscription revenue growth remained strong, with increased subscriptions on a sequential basis and meaningful year-over-year growth in digital-only ARPU. In Q1, our digital-only subscription revenue reached a high of $43.5 million, growing 21.3%. The company's digital-only ARPU also reached a new high of $7.22, increasing 22.4% year-over-year. One important operating element continues to be optimizing our print and commercial revenue business. We continue to focus on improving the overall trends in our legacy revenue streams, which is why we continue to strengthen the overall quality and value proposition of our print product. These initiatives are already showing returns with positive feedback from our customers. As a result of our efforts, our overall print trends saw sequential improvement in Q1, and we expect to continue this momentum moving forward. Looking at the Domestic Gannett Media segment, in Q1, adjusted EBITDA of $44.5 million was up slightly, and adjusted EBITDA margin grew 60 basis points compared to the prior year. For Q1, our total revenues decreased 6.5%, representing a sequential improvement of 380 basis points, and demonstrates solid growth across each of our digital revenue streams. Turning to Newsquest. For Q1, adjusted EBITDA in this segment was $14.2 million, up 10.3%, and adjusted EBITDA margins grew 180 basis points to 23.5%. For Q1, total revenues grew 1.8% compared to the prior year. As we've discussed previously, please keep in mind that the Newsquest margins differ from our Gannett Media margins as a result of strategic differences in the print distribution model. In our Digital Marketing Solutions business, total core platform revenue in the first quarter was $116.1 million, representing an increase of 4.2%. Adjusted EBITDA for this segment was $8.8 million, representing a margin of 7.5%. We had approximately 14,300 core platform customers, with core platform ARPU reaching a new high and increasing 6.4% over the prior year. Additionally, budget retention saw an increase of 40 basis points year-over-year, reaching approximately 96%. At the end of the first quarter, our cash balance stood at $93.3 million, and our outstanding net debt was approximately $1 billion. Cash provided by operating activities in Q1 was $22.5 million, up $15.1 million. We also grew our fee cash flow from a use of $2.1 million in the prior quarter to a source of $9.5 million. We ended Q1 with approximately $1.1 billion of total debt, reflecting $16.3 million of total debt paydown for the quarter. During April, we retired the remaining $3.3 million balance of our 2024 convertible notes and repaid $2.4 million of our term loan using the proceeds from recent asset sales. Debt repayment remains our priority, and we will continue to focus on reducing our first lien net leverage, which remained at 2x in Q1. Before wrapping up, I just want to reiterate how excited we are about our performance in the first quarter. We believe our solid results reflect sustained momentum across our business, further validates our strategic plan, and represents just the beginning of the value we expect to generate for the year. I will now hand it back to the operator for questions, and then we will go back to Mike for some closing thoughts.