Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Saga Communications First Quarter 2024 Earnings Release and Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Chris Forgy. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Matt. And as I said last time, we're going to find a place for you and our company with that docile tones that you have. So we'll work on that. But again, thank you, Matt, and thanks to everyone who is taking the time to join us on the Saga's Q1 earnings call. We appreciate your continued interest, support participation in Saga Communications, a company that we believe is the best broadcast company on the planet. Lately, I've been hearing from other broadcasters, more and more things like man bad debt expense are increasing and 90-day old plus receivables are on the rise. Clients are booking later and paying even later. Saga is a buyer, not a seller. So talk to us about buying our company. Well, we too have experienced some of the -- some of the aforementioned and it makes you kind of wonder, is there a [ wows me ] a bit of a cast over the sector. Perhaps there is. But look, the industry is not broken, it's just slowing down, just a bit. And we could choose to sit still and do nothing and stay in the status quo and let gravity take its course or we can behave differently, and we've chosen the latter. Remember the story math problems we used to have in school, here's one for you. At best radio gets 7% of the media spend pie. So for example, if you're in a market in the radio group does a 35% share of revenue in that market, that station group is really only getting just shy of 3% of the total ad spend in that market. Forget the 7%, yet customers we deal with every single day, the ones that have "great relationships" with us. Spend over 60% of…

Thank you, Chris. Now from my favorite 2 paragraphs in the whole conference call. 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. Now on to the numbers. For the quarter ended March 31, 2024, net revenue decreased 2.5% to $24.7 million compared to $25.3 million last year. Political did not have a major impact this quarter. As for the quarter, we had $312,000 in gross political revenue this year compared to $194,000 for the same period last year. Political has been slower than expected so far this year. We do expect it to pick up as the year progresses, but it's still difficult to determine, where the hot races will be and how they will impact the states and markets we are in. Station operating expense, as Chris talked about, was up 5.9% to $23 million for the 3-month period. As discussed in previous conference calls, we made a strategic decision to reward our staff, pay increases and recognition of the work they do and for economic and competitive purposes, we continue to do so. These pay increases and related payroll taxes amounted to an estimated $471,000 or approximately 37% of the increase in the first quarter's station operating expense. We also had other smaller but still meaningful increases in our station operating expenses, including increases in health insurance sales surveys, interactive streaming and content and bad debt expense. This, in total, amounted to approximately 50% of our total station operating…

Thank you, Sam. Sam, remember I said earlier during the call that radio isn't broken, it's just slowing down. We just have an image or I think perception challenge if you will. So Sam what would you do if I told you, I have an app, not an appetizer because I know you jump all over that, but if I had an app. And that app during any given week reaches 91% of all adults 18 plus in the U.S. reaches a diverse audience and provides targetability, both digitally and over the air, is both hyperlocal and national simultaneously delivers the most efficient CPMs anywhere, out delivers all other streaming services like Amazon, Apple Music, YouTube, Spotify satellite radio combined, provides the greatest ROI ad spend ever and does all of these things right now. You like that app?

I'd ask you where to get it.

It's called radio. Radio isn't broken. It's just slowing down, maybe a little misunderstood. And Saga is not big enough in order to have the scale to speed radio back up for the entire sector, but we can speed it up for Saga. And the toughest time to change is not when something is broken, but when something starts to slow down and radio is slowing down. Think of a professional athlete who's just passed his or her prime, it's tough to move on from them and cut them loose. But if a career-ending injury occurs, then you have to. You have no choice but to change, and change is hard. We are choosing not to wait for a career-ending injury, but to create transformational change and growth. We've chosen. You've heard me say this many times during the call, we have chosen, we've done it voluntarily. We're bringing this on ourselves, if you will, to bring about and initiate our own transformational change. And it takes time, discipline, investment spending and our very strong stomach to start the fire and keep it stoked. As I said, transformational change is not immediate and certainly isn't easy. If it were easy, everybody would be doing it, wouldn't I? Anything worth a dam isn't easy. In fact, many stop when it gets hard, they lack courage. We're doing it anyway. Encourage is nothing more than fear holding on just one moment longer. You see part of leadership is developing a vision and diligently staying with it even in the face of difficulty, doubt and those who don't want you to or don't believe you will succeed. We've been sharing quarter-by-quarter for 16 months, our growth in critical silos of business like e-comm. During the trailing 12 months, we produced nearly $2 million…

Well, first, I'm going to say, Chris, after listening to all that, all I can think of with seeing your Tennessee stuff here is, I want to put a helmet honestly, put me in coach. We can get this done -- about that sooner if I had it done so when you turned and looked at me, you'd have seen that. But -- yes, so we did get some questions, and it's always nice when we get questions, but it's even nicer went along the questions that were asked are questions we've already answered in the call. So I'm going to go to the ones that -- one of them was about how was the digital progress in Q1, which we've talked about. But it goes on with are you on track for 11% this year, basically with digital, interactive being a percentage of our overall revenue. And I would say that we were approximately 10% -- digital was approximately 10% of our overall revenue for the first quarter and that between 10 -- and again, I'm a financial guy, so I tend to be conservative in my answers, and 10% to 11% is certainly in the ballpark for the year. So I appreciate that question. Going to some of the other questions. The question was -- and I'm going to put 2 of them together, there was a question about please discuss when and amount of next dividend, dividends for the rest of the year as well as discussing current thinking on stock buybacks?

So if you don't mind, Sam, I'll take the first half of that. We've not yet declared dividend distribution. However, it is management's intention to recommend to return value to shareholders. whether it's quarterly operational dividends variable or the special dividend.

I would add to that, Chris, that the Board considers stock buybacks quarterly special and I said this for years. And our new variable dividend, which we paid for the first time earlier this year, and I talked about earlier at every Board meeting. The Board will consider and does disconsider and declare future dividends at their discretion based on current economic conditions as well as acquisition opportunities. We have like Lafayette, which we've already talked about in this call. It's certainly management intent, as you said, to continue to recommend the current level of quarterly dividends to the Board in the foreseeable future. Next question is -- and again it was...

We got lots of questions today.

Well, we did, but more of them we've already answered. So...

Okay. All right.

so we really have one more that -- and it really is a blending of 2 questions. We had a question that was which clusters were stronger in the quarter and where was the weakness, and then there was a tie in to our asset base, so to speak, relative to the size of our markets and what our intentions going forward were?

So the -- yes, the biggest cities took the brunt of the BCF decline during the quarter, but it certainly impacted markets of all sizes. Just for the FYI, following the Lafayette closing, we will then have 22 of our 27 markets will be markets that are -- that operate in markets that are smaller than 100 -- market 100. So our focus will always be on the smaller to midsize markets as we move forward and consider acquisition.

Very good. And with that, I think that is all we've got. As always, if anybody has further questions, please reach out to Chris and I directly, and we can arrange to you -- set up calls with you directly. So we appreciate everybody attending the call. And Matt will turn it back over to you to wrap up.

Thank you. Everyone, this concludes today's event. You may disconnect at this time, and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.

Thank you, Matt.

Thank you, Matt.