Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Saga Communications Fourth Quarter and Year-end Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Ed Christian. Sir, the floor is yours.

Catherine, thank you very much. Welcome, everybody, to another one [indiscernible] entertaining shows. I will tell you that Sam Bush will be joining momentarily with us, he is here right now. But I also want you to know that Sam's elaborate numbers, which will occupy several minutes are the only scripted thing that we have today. The rest will be, I'm hope interesting, shall we say. And with that now Sam will be interesting, too. I don't want to say that what he has is not interesting. Let's get pass that because he's giving me this evil look right now. So I'm just going to turn it around over to him and be quiet for a while.

Thank you, Ed. This call will contain forward-looking statements about our future performance and results of operations that involve risks and uncertainties that are described in the Risk Factors section of our most recent Form 10-K. This call will also contain a discussion of certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation for all the non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure are attached in the selected financial data tables. For the year ended December 31, 2021, net revenue increased 13.1% to $108.3 million. Gross political revenue for the full year in 2021 was $1.8 million compared to $6.9 million for the same period in 2020. When political is excluded, gross revenue increased 18.4% year-over-year. Station operating expense only increased 2% to $83.2 million for the 12-month period, while operating income was $15.1 million compared to $3.9 million when impairment charges are excluded for the year ended December 31, 2020. We had no impairment charges in 2021. Free cash flow was $13.8 million for the year compared to $7.6 million for the same period in 2020. Net income for the 12 months ended December 31, 2021, was $11.2 million or $1.85 per fully diluted share. Net revenue for the fourth quarter of 2021 increased 1.4% over the fourth quarter of 2020 to $29.2 million. Gross political revenue for the quarter was $886,000 in 2021 compared to $3.8 million for the same period in 2020. Without political, gross revenue increased 10.6% for the fourth quarter, while station operating expenses were up only 2.3% for the quarter to $21.6 million. Operating income was $4.9 million. Free cash flow was $3.9 million for the quarter. Net income was $3.7 million or $0.60 per fully diluted share for the fourth quarter. First quarter of 2022 is currently pacing ahead of the same period last…

Actually, I think we finally finished one of our building projects with brand-new studio building in Ocala, Florida, which we should have an opening party in, I think, several weeks on it. It's getting wrapped up as it is now, and the engineers are working on rewiring it. So that's one of the capital projects that is done well. When I started this, and I said everything was kind of scripted, I didn't really mean that in a derogatory manner towards anybody else, but I do have a -- I do note kind of a similarity in the other presentations. Well, a lot of the conversation really goes towards a discussion overall kind of like what Sam did, but there's more to it than that. And I kind of like to share with you a little bit behind what goes on and we'll call this for instance today, a peek inside the kitchen of the restaurant and see where we go in that. And I think a lot of things happen when we're talking about the business and to everybody outside is that we're really talking about the front room, which is usually a nice restaurant, very well decorated and everything else like that. And practically, you put together and you look at it and say, "Gee, this is a nice place to come." But you never really say, "Can I go visit the kitchen to find out exactly how they serve the meals." So let's take a second and go behind the scenes or actually maybe a minute or so or whatever. And I want to talk about what happens in the kitchen and let me talk about and bulk -- the revenue that radio stations generate, let's call that part of the kitchen. And how it's put together…

Thank you, Ed. As you remember, Ed, the conversation we just had with someone we know and trust quite well, who will remain nameless, who is very knowledgeable in all things National said to us, as you recall, just the other day that over the last few weeks, National business has gone crickets, silence. And as you remember, our response to one another was, okay, well, you know what, we can't control that. So let's move on. We can't forecast it; we can't control it. So to your point, the things that we do focus on and kind of look at it this way, we control the things we can and then we don't worry about the rest, things like. And I should say, because of the way Ed has built the company over time strategically brick-by-brick, Saga Communications is set up beautifully to do things like have 50% of our net revenue be made up of local direct business. Because in the markets that we're involved in, we are connected in the community, and we can impact the community and we can impact the market or mark to market. And so the things that we focus on are the things we control, like NTR, Ed mentioned events. We have created a number of events in all of our markets. COVID-19 put a little bit of a hold on some of those things. Those things are coming back and coming back strong. And so we anticipate a nice lift in 2022 with those events. The other one is digital, and we have seen an exponential growth as much as 65% per month all in when you're looking at streaming and targeted display. And the stuff that we love to sell when it comes to targeted display -- or excuse me,…

Thank you, Chris. I think that was very good. I'm not saying I'm speechless [indiscernible] very unusual for me. But I do want to just wrap that up with one thing more on the National business and how that's changed and why we don't participate in it because back in the early days, National was [indiscernible] because of the agencies and the discipline and everything that they did to dig into the radio station as to what it was and who it was and what it meant for the agencies? And how many of the time buyers back then knew the names as the morning shows and what they were in the community. And that's not there anymore. And we still have problems with how radio was sold as a whole. And I just -- without getting into a lot of other details, I tell you that this -- again, where we concentrate on the local business is so very important to us as a company. The way that we go after it, as Chris explained to you, is kind of the secret sauce that we're showing you what we're doing in these areas. At the same time, what we're doing in terms of our communities is important. One of the initiatives that we're doing right now, which we're starting is basically a cattle call for audio journalists because we've decided that we are ramping up in good numbers, hiring for each of our markets. We want more newspeople to come to work for us to help us gather and continue gathering and expanding in the communities. If you look right now at what's going on with newspapers, where they're closing around the country where the readership is going down, down, down. As they do close as they do go…

[indiscernible] business that has people come over and in competition to [indiscernible]. Well, I mean, nobody talked about that before until somebody came up with the idea of saying it and done it [indiscernible] create commercials for it, and then present them to the client and go from there. That's how it is. And this is just part of where it is and there's so much more. And believe me, we love to talk about it. We have no barriers towards communication with us. We're there. We love to talk about this. We'd love to try and inform our investors so that they really have an understanding of what Saga is all about rather than just reading some information and numbers to you. We want you to see behind the scenes, behind the kitchen door as to how we prepare and how we do it and what makes us as successful as we have become because we care. I think I've done enough speech on that [indiscernible] Sam.

I think that's very good.

Okay. I'm not going to carried away or anything like that. And I tried not to get to my usual fan speaking and a lot of the other stuff because I think it's important, especially here where we can't plan on national dollars where we have to have the bedrock of our business that we control, and that's part of what we do. Sam, is there anything else that I should really bring up here?

No, I think that's good. We did have one question come in. And it's understandable, and it was basically a question about the change in our tax rate between 2020 and 2021?

Do we do that?

Well, the change about that.

Unfortunately, we don't control that. So it is what it is. But 2020 was a very unique year due to the COVID impact on the financials. There were a number of reasons that 2020 tax rate was as different as it was, and I'm not going to try to go into all the technical gory details. But as our business begin to reflect a more normal operating environment in 2021, our tax rate returned to a more normalized rate of 28%. And going forward, we do anticipate our tax rate to be between 27% and 29% with a deferred rate of 3% to 5%. And I think that as best we can on a simple basis provides the answer to the question.

Okay. I forgot to mention something, and this will be my thing for it. Our industry has a propensity for kind of trying to reduce rates and go heading towards the bottom. But as of last week -- or actually this after a number of workups over the last months trying on this and in collaboration with 3 of our managers, one representing a smaller market, one a medium-sized, one a large-size, working with them and developing a plan, which I'm not going to spend a lot of time now. But basically, we have just raised rates across the company. We find it during a time when there was inflation of now, I think it's 6.7% or somewhere near -- or is it 7.6%, somewhere. I think it's 7.6% for new number related that we have [indiscernible] is a time for us that we couldn't raise rates something that is somewhat unique in the broadcast industry. But we have done so we have had set a floor for each of our markets as to what the rates are and design a plan again, has taken us about 6 weeks to put together on how this is effective in each one of the markets. It is mandatory. It is a floor. It's -- Chris has created [indiscernible] and with Sam involved in the project also created a way to make this so that we know that we can have a benchmark towards pushing forward to where we want to go over the next several years and it is upwards in terms of the value that we provide, and it is upwards in terms of the pricing for it. So I did want to put that in there and mention it's a solid thing. We'll be glad to spend any time talking to any of you about exactly how it's structured. We can get into that at that time. That's where I kind of end up on this, Sam, and if you can think of anything else?

No, I think we can turn it back over to Catherine to wrap up the call.

Thank you, Catherine.