TEGNA Inc. (NYSE:TGNA) Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call August 3, 2023 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Julie Heskett - SVP of Finance and IR

Dave Lougee - President and CEO

Victoria Harker - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Dan Kurnos - The Benchmark Company

Craig Huber - Huber Research

James Goss - Barrington Research

Steven Cahall - Wells Fargo

Aaron Watts - Deutsche Bank

Operator

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Second Quarter TEGNA Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentations, there'll be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this call is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Ms. Julie Heskett, Senior Vice President of Finance and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Julie Heskett

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to our second quarter conference call and webcast. Today, our President and CEO, Dave Lougee; and our CFO, Victoria Harker, will review TEGNA's financial performance and results, and discuss TEGNA's stand-alone outlook. After that, we'll open the call for questions.

Hopefully, you've had the opportunity to review our Form 8-K filed this morning with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as our second quarter earnings results. If you have not yet seen a copy of the release, it's available on tegna.com.

Before we get started, I'd like to remind you that this conference call and webcast includes forward-looking statements, and our actual results may differ. Factors that may cause them to differ are outlined in our SEC filings.

This presentation also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures. We have provided reconciliations of those measures to the most direct comparable GAAP measures in the press release.

With that, let me turn the call over to Dave.

Dave Lougee

Thank you, Julie, and good morning, everyone.

TEGNA's second quarter results reflect our continuing momentum and sharp focus on delivering value for our shareholders. We achieved a record second quarter for subscription revenue and saw a sequential improvement in underlying advertising trends this quarter compared to the first. Importantly, our solid results, along with our strong balance sheet underpin our ability to create value for TEGNA's shareholders, which I'll outline now and detail a little later in the call as well.

Building on our initial steps to return accumulated capital to shareholders, pending from the - during the merger - the failed merger agreement, today, we announced that TEGNA's Board approved a second accelerated share repurchase agreement or ASR of $325 million, which is expected to commence after our 3Q earnings are reported in early November.