Welcome to the Lee Enterprises 2022 first quarter webcast and conference call. The call is being recorded and will be available for replay beginning later this morning at investors.lee.net. At the close of the planned remarks, there will be an opportunity for questions. Participants accessing this call by webcast may submit written questions through the website, and they will be answered during the call as time permits. Otherwise, you will receive a response later. A link to the live webcast can be found at investors.lee.net. Now I will turn the call over to your host, Josh Rinehults, Vice President, Finance. Good morning, and thank you for joining us. Speaking on this morning's call are Kevin Mowbray, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Tim Millage, Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, and Treasurer. Also with us on today's call and available for questions is Nathan Bekke, Vice President, Audience Strategy. Earlier today, we issued a news release with preliminary results for our first fiscal quarter of 2022. It is available at lee.net as well as at major financial websites. We will be walking through an earnings presentation on today's call that can also be found at lee.net. As a reminder, this morning's discussion will include forward-looking statements that are based on our current expectations. These statements are subject to certain risks, trends, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Such factors are described in this morning's news release and also in our SEC filings. During the call, we refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA and cash costs, which are defined in our news release. Reconciliations to the relevant GAAP measures are included in tables accompanying the release. Now to open the discussion, our President and Chief Executive Officer, Kevin Mowbray. Kevin will open the conversation on Slide 3 of the earnings presentation for those following along. Thank you, Josh. Good morning, everyone. I'm pleased you could join us. Before we dive into the agenda you see on this slide, I wanna note that this call is focused on our first quarter results, growth strategy, and outlook. We won't be commenting on Alden Global Capital during our prepared remarks or in our Q&A. For more information on this, we encourage you to review our 2022 definitive proxy statement and related announcements, which are on file with the SEC and also available on our 2022 annual meeting section of our investor relations website. We appreciate your cooperation. Our agenda begins with an overview of Lee's compelling investment thesis, including the progress we've already made in our digital transformation and a review of our three-pillar digital growth strategy. I'll hand the call over to Tim to review our first quarter results and fiscal 2022 guidance in detail. At our core, Lee Enterprises is a leading provider of digital products and services and high-quality, trusted local news and information to communities across the country. Seven out of 10 adults in our markets depend on the local, relevant, and engaging local news that only we provide. Our platforms reach more than 47 million unique visitors each month across 77 attractive mid-sized markets. Lee's strong presence as the trusted source of information in the communities we serve, combined with cutting-edge digital capabilities, is the foundation of our digital transformation. The success of our transformation is reflected in the continued rapid growth of our digital subscriptions and digital-only audience revenue. We are the fastest-growing digital subscription platform in local media. We achieved an exciting milestone in the first quarter, reaching 450,000 digital-only subscribers, representing 57% year-over-year growth and exceeding the halfway mark of our target of securing 900,000 digital-only subscribers in 2026. Our Amplified Digital agency is delivering dramatic growth. Digital advertising and marketing services revenue totaled $43 million in the quarter, fueled by dramatic growth from our Amplified Digital agency. Adjusting for one-time political revenue, digital advertising and marketing services revenue increased 30% year-over-year. Total digital revenue increased 17% year-over-year to $55 million. Total digital revenue, comprised of digital advertising and marketing services revenue, including Amplified Digital, digital-only subscription revenue, and digital services revenue, is one of several metrics we're providing to give better transparency and clarity on our digital transformation progress. We're continuing to prove out the strength of our business model and our revenue profile with success in growing subscriptions, which generate a steady base of recurring revenues. Lee grew subscription-based revenue to $107 million in the quarter, representing 53% of our total operating revenue. Under the guidance and oversight of our board of directors, our leadership team continued execution of our growth strategy sets the stage for significant long-term value creation. We're very pleased with our results and the progress we're making towards the targets in our three-pillar digital growth strategy. Slide 5 is an overview of the three-pillar digital growth strategy that's guiding our transformation to a vibrant digitally centric company. We're focused on expanding our digital audiences, growing our digital subscription base and revenue, and diversifying and expanding our offerings for local advertisers. We expect that continued execution of our strategy will drive more than $435 million in recurring sustainable digital revenue by 2026. We launched our three pillar strategy in early 2021. As you can see on Slide 6, we made tremendous progress throughout fiscal year 2021, including industry leading growth in digital subscribers and digital agency revenue. For fiscal 2021, total digital revenue grew to $189 million. As you saw in our results this morning, and as Tim will speak to in more detail, we're accelerating this momentum in fiscal 2022. Execution on our three pillar digital growth strategy is at the core of the value we're creating for shareholders as shown on Slide 7. Sustainable long-term revenue growth from our three pillar initiatives will drive margin expansion and stronger free cash flow, which will fuel our continued debt reduction and balance sheet enhancements. Enhanced operating cash flow and profits, a strengthened balance sheet and multiple expansion fueled by increasing recurring high margin digital revenue creates a strong path to significant long-term value creation for our shareholders. With that overview, I'll dive a bit deeper into the initiatives supporting each of the three pillars of our digital growth strategy. Our strategy leverages Lee's key strengths, our local market expertise, our industry leading digital revenue growth, and our commitment to the highest quality news to build a larger recurring revenue base and generate long-term top line growth. This growth, expected to achieve $435 million in digital revenue in 2026, is driven by increased digital subscriptions from initiatives in Pillar 1 and 2 and increased digital advertising revenue from Pillar 3. Slide 10 offers an in-depth look at Pillar 1 focused on expanding digital audiences. With investments in user experience, multimedia presentation format, and rich high-value content, we're driving higher engagement, outsized traffic, and monetization. As noted in our press release, video revenue was up 98% in the quarter. This is off a modest base, but it's indicative of the attractive opportunities we have leveraging our trusted brands, strong market positions, and in-house capabilities. We continue to make value-added investments to drive additional growth. This is important as it aims to increase digital audiences, thereby increasing the addressable market for digital subscribers. Pillar 2 is the expansion of our base of digital-only subscriptions and revenue by converting more of our vast addressable market to subscribers. We're leveraging cutting-edge data and technology and expanded offerings for paid niche content on topics where we have expertise and unique selling positions. These tactics are driving an increase in total subscribers and position us to achieve our goal of reaching 900,000 digital only subscribers by the end of 2026. As I mentioned earlier, we are already more than at the halfway mark for this target. At the end of the first quarter of 2022, we had 450,000 digitally only subscribers, a 57% increase year-over-year. Reaching 900,000 digital only subscribers and increasing our average digital subscription rates are important goals in Lee's digital transformation, and it increases the base of our subscription-based digital revenue. We expect to reach an inflection point next year when our digital-only audience will overtake print subscriptions and make up the majority of our subscriptions overall. As shown on Slide 12, growing digital subscribers requires both expanding our addressable market and strengthening our visitor to subscriber conversion rates. In addition to offering more attractive niche subscriptions that appeal to targeted audience, we're also deploying advanced email and social media strategies using our extensive first-party data and technology developed by TownNews, our SaaS content platform. These efforts are focused on a huge attractive addressable market. Today, we have 47 million unique visitors each month, 12 million loyal readers with more than two visits per month, and 2.4 million highly engaged readers with four or more visits each month. Our goal is to turn these readers into a base of 900,000 digital subscribers generating strong recurring revenues, and as I mentioned, we're more than halfway there. We're converting readers into digital subscribers faster than our peers. As you can see on Slide 13, Lee's digital subscription growth far outpaces Gannett and The New York Times for 12 quarters running. This demonstrates a strong track record of high-level execution and, coupled with talent and technology investments, we believe will continue to be an industry leader. Our continued momentum makes us confident in our ability to reach 900,000 digital subscribers in 2026, because it only requires converting a modest portion of our total addressable market. Importantly, while we predict a brisk and steady climb in digital subscribers, we expect to deliver even faster revenue growth over the period through a modest increase in ARP. As we execute our Pillar 2 plans, including targeted offers, premium pricing for niche products, using data and analytics to maximize pricing actions, we believe we have a clear path to grow our digital-only recurring sustainable subscription revenue to $100 million in 2026, representing a 29% combined average growth rate To sum up on Slide 15, we have already established a record of accelerating digital subscription growth. With planned incremental investments in talent and technology, we're on track to reach our goal of 900,000 paid digital-only subscribers in 2026. Continued execution of that strategy is expected to generate recurring sustainable digital subscription revenue exceeding $100 million. Turning to Slide 16. Our Pillar 3 focuses on diversifying and expanding our offerings for advertisers, and we're doing that in two ways. First, through Amplified, our full-service omni-channel digital marketing agency that provides local advertisers with sophisticated custom solutions, including consulting, media buying, and analytics. Second, by maximizing our owned and operated revenue opportunities on these digital platforms. Our owned and operated properties attract massive audiences, offering more video inventory and branded content to boost our digital ad revenue. Both of these initiatives are supported by Lee's Vision platform. Vision is a proprietary sales enablement tool powered by Amplified Digital. In sync with our strategic partnership with Mudd Advertising, a leading full-service automotive advertising agency, we've licensed Lee's innovative Vision platform to enable its partners to fully support cross-channel marketing efforts. Industry-wide, omni-channel advertising for local advertisers is expected to continue its double-digit growth in the next two years. The Vision platform allows us to capture the significant growth in this category, and the Vision platform has absolutely transformed local advertising for Lee Enterprises. As you can see on Slide 17, our Amplified Digital agency revenues are growing rapidly. With advanced data-driven ad tech, specialized category expertise, scalable custom content video, and powerful first-party data access, Amplified Digital is a strong partner for local and regional businesses looking to drive growth. We're continuing to expand Amplify's capabilities, including building out new e-commerce solutions to offer our ad partners. In our first quarter, Amplify revenue grew 69% year-over-year. We continue to see a significant growth runway as we execute our strategy. We're projecting $65 million in Amplify revenue in FY 2022 to reach our target of $100 million in Amplify revenues by 2024. Amplify's dramatic growth trajectory is fueling our five-year digital advertising outlook. We expect to reach $310 million of annual digital advertising revenue in 2026, of which about $200 million will come from Amplify. Summing up our advertising strategy on Slide 19, Amplify is a major growth engine for our digital advertising transformation. Our Vision platform uniquely positions us to capitalize on the double-digit growth in omni-channel digital advertising, and we expect to generate recurring sustainable digital revenue exceeding $310 million in 2026. Now I'll turn it over to Tim to discuss our first quarter financial performance. Thank you, Kevin. I'm now moving to Slide 20. We're very pleased with our results and the progress we continue to make on our three-pillar digital growth strategy. At a high level, we finished the quarter with solid revenues, especially strong in our digital growth categories, and continued to control costs in our legacy print business. We also continued to make targeted investments in our platform to fuel our digital transformation. This performance has us on track to achieve our full-year targets for digital revenue and adjusted EBITDA. Moving to our first quarter financial highlights and outlook. Total operating revenue was $202 million in the first quarter. Total digital revenue increased 17% in the first quarter to $55 million. Excluding political advertising, which generated high revenue during the 2020 campaign season, total digital revenue increased 25% in the quarter. Total digital revenue was driven by the rapid growth of Amplified and growth in digital-only subscription revenue. Digital-only subscription revenue increased 26% and totaled $8 million. We now have over 450,000 paid digital-only subscribers, up 57% in the quarter, which represents 1/2 of our long-term target of 900,000 digital-only subscribers. Digital advertising and marketing services revenue increased 19% in the quarter to $43 million. Excluding the digital political revenue, digital advertising and marketing services revenue increased 30%. Digital marketing services revenue at Amplified fueled the growth with revenue up 69%, totaling $15 million in a quarter and $47 million over the last 12 months. Total print revenue was $147 million in the first quarter, an 11% decline compared to the same quarter a year ago due to continued secular declines and supply chain constraints affecting the demand for national advertising. Operating expenses totaled $179 million, and cash costs were up 2.5%. Increases in cash costs were attributed to strategic investments in digital talent and technology tied to our digital growth strategy and increased digital cost of goods sold as we cycled one-time benefits received in the prior year, principally medical. We continued our business transformation efforts by reducing legacy print costs, partially offsetting the increases. Net income totaled $13.2 million, and adjusted EBITDA totaled $26.1 million. As for our fiscal 2022 outlook, we expect to deliver continued digital growth from the execution of our strategy. We expect to achieve 495,000 digital-only subscribers, $33 million in digital-only subscription revenue, $175 million in digital advertising and marketing services revenue, $230 million in total digital revenue, and adjusted EBITDA in the range of $95-$98 million. Moving to Slide 22, we have a long history of responsibly managing our cost structure, and we have continued to capture efficiencies across our business since the acquisition of BH Media. In addition to the significant synergies achieved since closing, we remain focused on leveraging our larger platform to share resources, centralize certain operations, and reduce our overall cost structure. We have a current base of more than $300 million of direct costs associated with our legacy revenue streams. Through sustainable cost management, we expect to achieve $20 million-$30 million reduction in legacy costs in FY 2022 compared to the prior year. While we remain focused on maximizing our efficiencies and reducing the cost structure of our legacy print business and growing profits, our main priority is to drive long-term, sustainable digital revenue growth. As a result, we are making targeted investments that will drive our digital future and will impact cash costs. We expect the investments we are making in new talent and technology and the increased digital cost of goods sold to increase cash costs by approximately $36 million. Slide 23 describes those targeted investments in more detail. Transforming Lee's model from a legacy print-centric business to a vibrant digitally-centric business requires significant investments in talent and technology. For example, on the talent side, we are focused on bringing on team members with AI expertise as we lean into more data-driven products at Amplified, executive producers to curate more of the custom video content that grew 98% year-over-year, and user experience experts as we continue to transform the presentation of local news. In systems and infrastructure, our planned investments include data lake technology to more efficiently store our growing pool of first-party data, as well as data visualization tools to enable our newsrooms and our operators to analyze that data and drive enhanced reader engagement. We anticipate around $15 million of incremental co-investments in FY 2022. Moving to Slide 24, we continue to strengthen our balance sheet. The principal amount of debt at the end of the first quarter was $463 million, down $20 million sequentially, and this is down $113 million or 20% since our March 2020 refinancing. As a reminder, our credit agreement with Berkshire Hathaway, our sole lender, has favorable terms that are incredibly important for us as we execute our strategy, as it allows us to make the necessary investments in talent and technology that fuel our recurring sustainable revenue growth. We made no pension contributions in the first quarter, and we do not expect any pension contributions in fiscal year 2022. Finally, we continue to identify opportunities to monetize our real estate, which facilitates accelerated debt repayment. We generated $25 million of proceeds in 2021 and are targeting an additional $20 million-$30 million in asset sales in fiscal 2022, with $14 million already closed in the first quarter. As a reminder, our goal is to achieve our long-term leverage target of under 2.5x by the end of 2026. Next, I'll take a moment to outline Lee's 5-year outlook and the rationale for our new financial metrics. As Kevin mentioned at the top of the call, we are providing metrics to give better transparency and clarity on our digital transformation progress. Total digital revenue is defined as digital advertising and marketing services revenue, including Amplify, digital-only subscription revenue, and digital services revenue. Previously, other digital subscription revenue was included, and all periods in this presentation have been restated for this reclassification. This table summarizes our fiscal 2022 outlook and beyond. As you can see, we expect to make significant continued progress on our digital transformation over the next several years. With that, I will turn it back over to Kevin to wrap up. Thanks, Tim. To wrap up, I'd like to thank the entire Lee team for their efforts in driving our transformation. We have the right board, the right team, and the right strategy, and I believe we're better positioned than ever to create long-term value for our readers, users, advertisers, and shareholders. This concludes our remarks. The team will remain on the line for questions you may have. Operator, please open the line for questions. Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. As a reminder, if you are accessing this call by webcast, you may submit typed questions on your screen. Those questions will be answered during the call as time permits. If you would like to ask a question over the telephone, you may signal by pressing Star on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. One moment please while we poll for questions. We'll now take our first question. Caller, your line is open. Thank you. It's always nice when a company beats expectations, so that's great. Congratulations. A couple questions. Can you remind me again what the digital political advertising number was in the year, prior quarter? Yeah. Thanks, Mike. I appreciate the comments. Yeah, we had around $3 million of political revenue in the prior year that you know was associated with various campaigns across our markets. Oh, great. Can you tell me, when do you cycle against the changes in the paywall with your digital sites? When do you cycle against that? Yeah, most of those changes will cycle in the middle of FY 2022. We did them fairly late in the fiscal year in 2021. Gotcha. In terms of Amplify, you know, obviously very strong growth there. Can you discuss the tone of the current market? Maybe also discuss that on the print advertising side, if you can. I'm just kinda curious to see, you know, how, if there were any impacts with the Omicron variant, you know, issues with, how the pace of the recovery looks, in terms of both on the digital side and whether or not we're starting to see more moderation on the print side. Can you just kinda give us a color of the current advertising environment? Sure. I'll start. This is Kevin. I'd give you an answer in a couple of bites. I would say the recovery as it relates to regional and local advertisers is really strong, and I think that's clear based on the really strong growth we saw in Q1 of 69% of Amplified Digital. Recovery's a little bit slower, primarily tied to supply chain issues with key accounts. You know, they're not getting products on the shelves. That's accounts like Target, Kohl's and others. We're seeing a different impact there. Does that also affect the auto category? I'm just curious because I understand that, you know, cars are selling pretty well and that they haven't been advertising as strongly. I was just curious, you know, how important of a category is that now still for you, and if you could just talk a little bit about that category in particular. Sure. We have, as you mentioned in our remarks, we've got a really great relationship with Mudd Advertising, which allows us to participate in the share of revenue based on our Vision platform. We feel good about that. You're right, car sales have been selling briskly, particularly used cars. As a result, we do see revenues down in that category. I would point out, though, that category isn't the largest category in classified. It's really obits that, you know, are much larger in terms of a revenue segment. Yeah. Just to clarify, you mentioned about the $14 million in closed real estate sales in the quarter. Just to clarify, the $20 million-$30 million for fiscal 2022, that did not include the, or that was inclusive of the $14 million, correct? That's correct. That's a fiscal year 2022 guidance of $20 million-$30 million in closed sales, which $14 million were closed in the first quarter. Gotcha. I think that's all I have for now. Thank you so much. I'll let others ask questions. Thank you. Great. Thanks, Mike. We will turn over to webcast questions. Okay. Our first question from the webcast is, you had another great quarter with digital sub growth of 48,000, but our full year guidance only requires averaging 15,000 per quarter to achieve. Is that because the target is conservative or because you're expecting a slowdown? I think what I would say is our target is, you know, our goal is hitting 900,000 digital-only subscribers, you know, is our target. It's our long-term target, and getting there is not gonna be a perfectly linear line from where we are here to, you know, 900,000. The reason for that is we're trying to grow both our units as well as growing our rates. We think we have the opportunity to look at the market-specific factors, and in some quarters we will outperform on the rate. In some quarters, we will outperform on the volume. Okay. Next question. There appears to be a lot of embedded value in Lee. What are your thoughts on selling or spinning off Amplified or TownNews? Yeah, I think Amplified and TownNews are both really important factors in our digital growth strategy. Amplified, we spent a lot of time talking about this morning is one of the major growth engines of our digital advertising and reaching the targets that we have there. You know, right now, $47 million of LTM revenue is a relatively small base, but we do expect it to expand and grow in the future. TownNews remains a key priority for Lee as it helps us develop the tactics and strategies and technology to execute on our three-pillar digital growth strategy. I would say that, you know, the better value is to leverage the digital businesses to execute on our three-pillar digital growth strategy. Okay. Next question is, warrants issued in 2014 are due to expire at the end of March of this year. Have any been redeemed? If so, how many? Yeah, that's a good question. As a reminder, we have warrants that were issued in 2014 associated with a debt refinancing that allows for issuing up to 600,000 shares of Lee's stock. The exercise price of the warrants is $41.90. None have been exercised as of now, but as you rightly pointed out, they expire March 31, 2022. We have no more questions from our web participants. I'll turn the call back to Kevin for closing remarks. Thank you for your interest in Lee, and thank you for joining the call today. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. At this time, we have reached the end of our question and answer session, and this concludes our call. We thank you all for your participation.