Good day, everyone and welcome to the Saga Communications Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Release and Conference Call. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host Chris Forgy. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Matt. Good morning, and welcome to our corporate team, our shareholders, the writers from our industry's trade publications and our Saga employees, all who have joined us today for the third quarter earnings call. So thank you for being here. It's been another interesting few weeks hasn't it? Today half of the citizens in the US are elated. The other half woke up yesterday unhappy and frankly concerned for their future. Regardless of which side of the aisle you're on, these are turbulent times no question about it. We are -- recently saw more layoffs in the automotive and broadcast sectors and many of our advertising partners are forced between -- to choose between meeting their payroll or putting a hold on their advertising. It's truly a Main Street thing and it's been going on for some time. So the question is what do we do about it? Saga's approaches to turbulent times come from a passage called the Stockdale Paradox that we've shared with our leadership team and characterizes how we are behaving going through it. It goes like this. In order to navigate difficult times, you must first confront the brutal facts accepting the current reality even if it's difficult. You must maintain faith, having an unwavering belief that you will prevail, no matter how long it takes. You must be consistent, continuing to work through pain and uncertainty. You must acknowledge your mistakes and accept that failure and bad decisions are inevitable and acknowledge it to yourself, your team and you must overcome temporary difficulties by embracing challenges as temporary constraints and develop a plan to live in the crisis. Finally, you must stay focused maintain a personal sense of spirituality, morality, values and meaning. This type of discipline during the transformational change, we chose…

Thank you, Chris. 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 measures are attached in the selected financial data tables. For the quarter ended September 30, 2024, net revenue decreased 3.5% to $28.1 million, compared to $29.1 million last year. Political was a bit better as for the quarter, we had $677,000 in gross political revenue this year, compared to $234,000 for the same period last year. Station operating expense increased 3.1% to $23.5 million for the three-month period. Station operating income, a non-GAAP financial measure for the quarter was $6 million and net income was $1.3 million, or $0.20 per fully diluted share. On a same-station basis for the third quarter, net revenue decreased 5.8% to $27.5 million and station operating expense decreased 0.3% to $22.7 million. As a reminder, we closed on the purchase of the Lafayette stations on May 31, 2024. Everything in Lafayette is coming along nicely as they are getting fully integrated into the Saga operating procedures and culture. For the nine-month period ended September 30, 2024, net revenue decreased 2.5% to $81.5 million. Gross political revenue was $1.3 million for the period, compared to $538,000 for the same period last year. Station operating expense increased 4.7% to $70 million for the nine-month period. Station operating income, a non-GAAP financial measure for the nine months, was $15.2 million, and net income was $2.2 million, or $0.35 per fully diluted share. Keep in mind that as you look at the net income for the nine-month period…

Well Sam, I think it's safe to say that there's turbulence in the environment in the economy in our sector and a number of sectors. Turbulence seems to be one of those ongoing phrases and terms that we use and hear a lot about. Nothing more turbulent than what we experienced recently. As most of you know, Hurricane Helene the first of two hurricanes that made landfall last month on the West Coast of Florida also wreaked havoc all the way to the Carolinas. There was massive flooding. Saga owns seven radio stations and an online news site in Asheville, North Carolina called 828newsNOW. The city of Asheville was absolutely decimated. Asheville was literally and figuratively under water. The members of the Asheville Radio Group -- Media Group led by President, GM Tom Davis; Operations Manager, Steve Richards; and Chief Engineer, Cameron Dempsey, along with many others ran towards the challenges and not away from them. Because when it's time to shine that's what we do even when circumstances are dire. So for a moment picture this. No phone, no Internet access. 60% of the city had no power. The water treatment facility was wiped out thus there was no running water whatsoever for weeks and there's still a limited amount of potable water today. The hospital was overwhelmed with injured flood victims. Water tanks were brought into the hospital and were protected by FEMA agents, so the hospital staff could treat the injured without interruption. Additional medical personnel came all the way from Texas and even Canada to assist. And sadly, there were over 100 lives lost. It was like a war zone. During all this chaos, five of our seven Asheville Media Group radio stations remained on the air. Thanks to employees like Cameron and Steve who I…

Chris, we had a few questions come in. Most of them we've at least touched on, but maybe we can go into a little bit more depth. The first is in terms of the digital business what are the headwinds that you face in growing your digital business competitive environment talented digital sales staff economic headwinds?

Sam, there are really like four words that come to mind when I think about that question. And we've talked about this with our leadership team, with our media advisers and with our corporate staff and with our Board. The things that are causing downdraft or can cause some issues for us are simply time, talent, training and speed focusing on the -- really it's just the time to catch up. We were 10 or 12 years behind in the start of our digital processes. So we had a lot of catch-up to do. That takes money and time and training. Talent. Frankly, it's been difficult before we made this transition to find hire and onboard really good sales talent. So even with our really strong processes that we have to find and hire and evaluate the talent. So talent is a challenge. And then the onboarding of the people as I mentioned and then the training. The training also takes time. And it not only takes time to do the training it takes time to practice and get really good at it. So you are not having to play slow you can play fast which brings in the final element and that's speed. The better we learn the more we practice this, the better we get at it, the faster we can run and the faster the results will come.

Very good. Thank you. You also talked a little bit about the tone of the advertising market heading into Q4 without the political. And you talked about Main Street and what the advertisers were saying on Main Street. We obviously all know that looking at the political aspects of what's been going on over the last year with the elections, what's been going on in, Palestine, Israel, Ukraine, the economics of the world, the car issues and so forth. But would you like to say anything else about the advertising market in Q4?

Well, I think there's both good news and not so good news. I mean, you saw Stellantis and GM make major layoffs in Detroit, just a couple of weeks ago. We also saw major broadcast sector layoffs that happened over the last couple of days and from what I understand they're not finished. And to me people are our most important resource and we can't win without people and without the resources to train them and equip them. So for me that's really -- that part of it is really off the table. But that wasn't a metaphor when I said our advertising partners are having to make decisions about whether to meet payroll or pause their advertising campaigns. That has actually been said multiple times. I actually got that and shared it in a Board meeting I think from one of our leaders in one of our markets that advertisers were actually saying that. At the same time, the stock market was performing pretty well yesterday. So there is both good news and bad news and some we control some we don't. We just focus on the ones we can control and run really fast and keep punching through.

Very good. I think we're moving in the right direction. Absolutely. Matt, I think we're good if you want to wrap up the call. And thanks everybody for joining.

Thank you.

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