Lee Enterprises, Incorporated (LEE)
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Investor Presentation
Apr 5, 2021
Welcome to the Lee Enterprises April twenty twenty one Investor Presentation. 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.
Now I will turn the call over to your host, Tom Milledge, Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, and Treasurer.
Good morning. Thank you for joining us for an update on Lee Enterprises digital transformation, the progress we have made against our three pillar digital first growth strategy, and Lee's upcoming move to the Nasdaq, which we announced this morning. Before we get started, let me first touch on a few items. On our Investor Relations website, you will find the press release that posted this morning along with a copy of the presentation that Kevin Mowbray and I will walk through today. Please note that today's remarks will include forward looking statements based on management's current views and assumptions.
Slide two is our safe harbor and lists several factors that could cause our future results to be different than our current estimates. So with that, I will turn the presentation over to Lee's President and Chief Executive Officer, Kevin Mowbray.
Thank you, Tim. Good morning, I'm Kevin Mowbray, President and CEO of Lee Enterprises, and I'm pleased you could join us. The focus of our discussion this morning is on lead strategy for growth in future value creation. Those who've been following our company know that we've been working with urgency to execute our digital transformation, which really accelerated following the completion of our transaction with with Berkshire Hathaway a little over a year ago. We have terrific momentum as we progress on our journey.
Today, we're excited to share the plans and goals we've established under our three pillar strategy to deliver enhanced value for our readers, users, advertisers, partners, and shareholders. We'll also discuss our move to Nasdaq on April 19 as we turn the page to a new digital first chapter. But before we dive in, I'd like to start with an introduction to Lee. At Lee's core is our steadfast commitment to local news providing the 77 predominantly mid sized communities that we serve with valuable, intensely local, original news and information. Recent events over the last year have proven that our mission is more important than ever.
Our newsrooms have been have been providing the crucial factual coverage that our readers and users need to understand regarding the impacts of the coronavirus and the related guidance in their communities. And these publications closely covered the local political races and issues that mattered most in our markets during the two thousand and twenty election cycle. Our focus outside of major metropolitan markets provides us with key competitive advantages. Where we operate, these publications and platforms are the dominant source of local news and information, and our well established brands and trusted content have allowed us to plant deep roots in our communities. Our readers and users are engaged with our content in small and mid sized businesses, as well as a growing number of regional and national accounts rely on Lee as a results driven advertising partner.
Compared to new media players in major metro markets, we face significantly less competition for reader and advertiser attention, and our business is more resilient to the impact of microeconomic trends. If the media landscape continues to evolve and audiences and advertising dollars shift from print to digital, Lee has been forward thinking and nimble at rethinking, repositioning, and redeveloping our business with a digital first mindset. We have a strong and dominant digital presence, and we're proud to have the fastest growing digital subscription platform in local media. Our digital lead subscriptions grew more than 60 per 69% in each of the last five quarters. This morning, we'll discuss our plans to grow our total paid digital subscribers over the next five years and further expand our annualized recurring revenue base.
Recurring revenues were 376,000,000 in fiscal year two thousand and twenty. 47% of total revenues and include our sticky revenue streams of audience revenue, digital marketing services revenue at Amplified, and digital services revenue at TownNews. We see significant opportunities to increase this further as we expand our total subscriber base and grow digital marketing services revenue at our full service digital marketing agency, Amplify. We use a proven executor and operator. We delivered a 160,000,000 in adjusted EBITDA in the last twelve months of December 2020 despite the acute impact of the pandemic, and we've established a track record of outperforming our local media peers on revenue.
These qualities are some of the reasons Warren Buffett and the Berkshire Hathaway team entrusted Lee to manage their portfolio of local media operations, which we took over in 02/2018. We expanded that relationship with the completion of our acquisition of Beach Media Group's portfolio and the 576,000,000 investment into our capital structure through the comprehensive refinancing in March. This transformational transaction doubled our audience and significantly enhanced Lee's financial position through a comprehensive and long term refinancing. Then we'll discuss this transaction and capital structure in more detail later. So with that introduction to Lee, let me walk you through the key highlights on slide five we hope you will take away with you after this presentation.
First, Lee has an attractive market position with unmatched local market expertise as well as a solid balance sheet and cash flow. We're well positioned for growth. We also have a very well established digital foundation. We've made tremendous progress on our digital transformation so far. We're now focused on increasing the velocity of that transformation and building further momentum.
To guide us, Lee's board and management team are aligned on a clear three pillar strategy to drive our recurring revenue base and provide the pathway to long term sustainable revenue growth. As we execute the strategy, our strong cash flows will facilitate continued debt repayment, enhancing our flexibility to invest in new capabilities. And ultimately, the key takeaway is that we've set a bold course for our digital future. We're confident we have the right team and strategy to unlock full value of the lead platform for our shareholders, and we expect this will enable us to achieve evaluation that is more in line with our digital first peers. In this next section, I'll share a bit more detail about Lee's business and the products, services, and digital foundation from which we're building.
Slide seven is an overview of our three business areas that drive our revenue and growth. The first is consumer revenue, which comes from readers and users' subscription to our leading portfolio of about 350 weekly specialty print and digital platforms. These include marquee local publications like the Buffalo News and the Saint Louis Post Dispatch, as weather as well as several other high engaging niche content platforms. Our content is strong, and our model is very sticky. Once we convert a reader or user to a subscriber, either to a digital only or full access subscription, that revenue becomes recurring.
As of December 2020, Lee's total subscription revenue over the last twelve months was 356,000,000. A larger portion of Lee's revenue comes from our advertising and marketing services. As I mentioned earlier, Lee is an exceptional partner able to complete complex marketing solutions to a vast addressable market to lots to top local accounts and small and mid sized businesses in our communities. We've also been investing to capture more advertising dollars from large out of market regional and national accounts. Advertisers are attracted to our platform for two reasons.
First, we have a large engaged audience across 77 markets. In the 2021, we captured a monthly average 55,000,000 unique website visitors. Second, we have in house capabilities to activate sophisticated digital campaigns for SMBs as well as large regional and national accounts through our full service digital marketing agency, Amplify. Amplify runs about 5,000 active campaigns per month, and this capability presents tremendous opportunity to drive revenue within and outside of our local markets. The third revenue platform is TownNews Digital Services.
TownNews is the leading web hosting and number one content management service provider in local media. Soundnew's clients include more than 2,000 other media organizations, including broadcast, publishing, radio, and magazine. Over the past ten years, Soundnew has grown at a 10% annual compound rate, contributing growing recurring revenue and maintaining attractive 40% margins. Despite a smaller contribution to our total revenue, Tunnel News is the digital backbone of our local markets and is responsible for video and over the top expansion, as well as the development of products and technology that will help us reach our advertising and audience targets. These three revenue centers drive our business.
Our goal is to leverage our highly talented executives and cutting edge technology to grow our base of annualized recurring revenue in order to achieve sustainable year over year revenue growth. Slide eight shows the strong progress we've made on Lee's digital transformation. From 2013 to 02/2019, our digital revenue has an increase at a 10% combined average growth rate, driven by growth in all facets of our digital business, including four 54% of our compound annual growth rate on digital audience revenue. At the 2020, digital made up nearly 30% of Lee's LTM operating revenue and 34% of our advertising revenue over the same period. It's worth noting our digital subscription growth has also been leading the industry, outpacing our peers, including The New York Times company and Gannett for the past five quarters.
In December, we had over 286,000 digital only subscribers, which is significant considering we reached the 100,000 digital only subscriber milestone only a year ago. Continuing and enhancing our robust digital growth is the key to the next phase of our transformation, and it'll put us on a path towards sustainable revenue growth. Our three pillar growth strategy is designed to achieve that growth. Let's turn to slide nine. Our three pillar growth strategy leverages Lee's key strengths, local market expertise, industry leading digital revenue growth, and a commitment to the highest quality news to build a larger recurring revenue base and generate long term top line growth.
This growth will be driven by increased digital subscriptions and digital advertising revenue. Our three pillars are, first, transform the presentation of local news and information. We'll continue to provide best in class reader and user experiences with enhanced digital presentation that emphasize video and other multimedia formats and rich high value content to drive enhanced engagement, outsized traffic, and monetization. Second, we'll accelerate subscription growth. We need to further accelerate our growth of digitally subscriptions by converting more of our vast addressable market to subscribers, leveraging cutting edge data and technology, and expanding offerings of paid niche content on topics where we have expertise and unique selling position.
Finally, our third pillar is to diversify and expand offerings for advertisers. We're launching a portfolio of video advertising initiatives and e commerce sales strategies throughout our in house Amplified Digital agency, enabling advertisers to reach consumers in new ways, ledger leveraging these vast data rich digital audiences. And with our large local sales force of over 900 sellers, we're well positioned to drive new revenue streams. As we execute, we expect to achieve three goals within the next five years, enhance engagement, traffic, and monetization across our platforms, and grow total paid subscript subscribers such that our subscriber base, print and digital, grow in total over the five year period, and digital only subscriptions reach 900,000 digital only subscribers within five years. We'll also generate 100,000,000 in annualized revenue for an amplified digital agency in three years and achieve our long term leverage target of under 2.5 in five years.
And now I'll speak in more detail about each pillar, starting with the first, transforming the presentation of local news and information on slide 10. Pillar one is focused on upgrading and enhancing our digital presentation to adapt to how users want to consume content today, ensuring Lee's delivery of best in class used consumer experiences along with compelling and immersive content that drives audience loyalty, engagement, and digital subscriptions. At Lee, digital traffic is migrating rapidly from desktop to mobile. Just three years ago, less than half of our traffic was mobile. And today, mobile users, over two thirds of our traffic.
We've also seen that our local breaking news video content drives superior engagement compared to any other medium. Given the way our users are consuming content, enhancing our ability to monetize platforms with video is a critical strategic opportunity to drive subscriptions and revenue growth. Our new video centric mobile experience is designed to do just that. We model our presentation of visual content leaders like Netflix and Amazon and are dramatically upgrading our video content to meet the user multimedia multi format preferences that consumers demand. To execute, we've been investing in user experience developer talent to create a cohesive digital experience across all of our platforms, as well as tools to support our newsrooms to quickly capture and produce video news, enabling capabilities like going live from the governor's press conference to delivering timely local weather videos.
We're also leveraging local syndicated third party video, photo galleries, informational graphics, audio, and digital interactive on our platforms to provide rich multimedia content. Our new presentation will highlight the various types of multimedia content we offer, especially as we build out additional content verticals like podcasts in topics where we have niche expertise and unique selling position, including brand permissions in sports. Pillar two described on slide 11 is all about converting more of our vast addressable market in and out of our communities into subscribers, which we believe will help us achieve our goal of growing total paid subscribers over the next five years, reaching 900,000 digital only subscribers. Rapidly growing our digital subscription base while maximizing the profitability of our full access subscribers will be key to our success. We're starting by transforming our print centric subscription model into a robust model designed to drive digital only growth.
We've hired new consumer sales and marketing talent, added new technology, and are leveraging consumer insights and data to develop a model built to drive conversion. This model will target audiences with thoughtfully priced plans tailored to groups of digital users with specific usage patterns, needs, and interests. Our team is already hard at work to deliver our near term goal, which kicked off on March 1, an enterprise wide effort to grow a net 100,000 digital only subscriptions in two hundred days. Also, on the operational side, we're looking at ways to expand our ongoing successful day of week print transformation to maximize print revenue subscription opportunities. We're analyzing our markets to identify opportunities to improve profit yield yield from full access subscribers.
In markets where we've re reached pricing capacity on our full access subscriptions, we're reducing print publications by one, two, or three days to improve our cash flow and profits while aggressively pursuing digitally subscription growth to expand our total audience. Our daily print transformation has enabled a cost efficient opportunity as we rationalize our legacy print business. And in the 21 markets where we've already executed this strategy, digital only subscriptions as a percent of all subscription has risen from 21% to 35% over the past year. And finally, to accelerate subscription growth, we are hyper focused on monetizing new areas of niche content, and I'll touch on that soon. So what's important to understand is you can see on slide 11, our plan is to grow our overall subscriptions pulled by fueled by audience growth.
Our plan expects that we will grow subscribers in total, print and digital, in each of the last next five years, and will achieve 900,000 of digital only subscriptions. Growing total paid subscriber base is significant in that it means we do not plan to merely convert full access subscribers to digital only subscribers, but rather our audiences are growing. Recent data suggest that 90 per 95% of our new digital only subscribers were not full access subscriber in the last six months. We also expect to reach a digital inflection point in fiscal year two thousand and twenty three, meaning digital subscriptions will exceed the number of full access subscriptions. Given the way consumers today engage with their media, we, of course, anticipate that full subscriptions will continue to wane over time.
However, strategy does not focus on consumers shifting away from full access towards digital. Instead, we're broadening our overall base to welcome new digital subscribers into the fold. We'll accomplish that by enhancing our conversion among our huge addressable market as shown on slide 12. We is well positioned in 77 very attractive markets where, in general, consumers are highly engaged with high disposable incomes and engaged in their communities. To get a sense of the size of the opportunity, 55,000,000 unique visitors visit plat visit our platforms each month.
About 12,000,000 loyal readers visit two to four times per month. And as of the end of f y twenty one first quarter, we have 286,000 digital only subscribers. In addition to growing our addressable market, converting more of our audience to subscribers is key to achieving our long term revenue growth goal. To capture more subscribers and generate growth, we will be expanding our offering of paid e newsletters and topics where we have niche expertise and unique selling positions. In the 2021, we'll be launching Napa Wine Test Test, a paid e newsletter with exclusive content from leading wine experts in the Napa Valley wine region.
And the Husker Sports platform, a paid Nebraska sports content platform that leverages local sports content resources across 11 markets in Nebraska. These first additions to our subscription based niche content offerings show in more detail on slide 13 our ability to leverage resources where we have brand permission that Lee has today to create opportunities for us to convert new subscribers both in and out of our local markets. Another way we're enhancing conversion is by implementing data driven dynamic content metering. We're currently piloting two new meter models that leverage digital segmentation based on attributes including device type, visit duration, and referral source to target users with tailored offers based on the way they engage with our platform. For example, a frequent mobile user will be offered a subscription tailored to e editions and newsletters.
Every sports reader might be offered a sports package subscription. A previous subscriber will be met with compelling win back offer. We're also leveraging data to deliver retention engagement campaigns for new subscribers and get and beginning campaigns for readers who began the subscription process but didn't complete it. These strategies are on the cutting edge of dynamic metering, and we expect this technology and broader application of data and analytics across our business will enable us to achieve our goals. Turning to slide 14.
The third pillar of our strategy is to diverse diversify and expand our offerings for both SMBs and top local accounts in our markets, as well as for the large regional and national accounts outside of our markets by accelerating our first to market position and leveraging the expansive array of digital product offerings, services, and marketing solutions we have. These vast audience and deep embedded relationships in our communities make us a very attractive advertising partner. We have strong, trusted presence and are often the only source of local news and information in our predominantly mid sized markets. Our data shows that these platforms reach nearly 70% of adult population in our markets weekly. We're focused on building our capabilities to offer more innovative ways to help an even larger number of advertisers reach their digital audiences and generate new digital revenue for the both from top local accounts and SMBs in our local markets, and by winning more business from large regional and national accounts.
We see an immense opportunity in both markets. On the local market side, we expect that we will gain market share with our first to market digital solutions in the top local accounts and SMBs. As I mentioned earlier, we run about 5,000 campaigns monthly, which drives high margin revenue within our local markets. As we invest in more digital first strategies and advanced capabilities, we'll generate enhanced digital revenue with sophisticated ecommerce sales strategies, sponsorships and branded content, and video digital banners to maximize the monetization opportunities on our owned and operated platforms. In parallel, we're focused on expanding our foot hold with large and national accounts in categories where Lee has expertise like automotive and health care.
Our full service, anti digital agency can scale to support clients with strategic media buying and consulting. And we're investing in tools that leverage Lee's first party audience data alongside our advertisers' consumer data to enable premium pricing for our value added services in reach. On the left side of slide 15, you'll see an overview of Amplify's comprehensive offerings, which encompass a wide variety of digital marketing services from consulting, strategic media buying and analytics, to scalable custom content that is sector specific. Amplify just partnered with major ecommerce platforms, Shopify and WooCommerce, which is enabling Lee to leverage advanced data and analytics and ecommerce sales strategies to deliver more measurable lift to our advertisers, part to our advertising partners. These services and capabilities build on our well established digital advertising infrastructure and enable lead to compete and win more out of market opportunities.
A core a core component of our three pillar execution will be driving growth in our agency of record business, building the long term relationship with advertisers and expanding our base of recurring revenue. As we continue in to invest in Amplify's capabilities and execute on opportunities in and out of our markets, we believe Amplify is poised to reach 100,000,000 in annualized revenue within three years, more than double the revenue we're seeing today. As I've mentioned, another component of pillar three will be leveraging niche content to create unique advertising and sponsorship opportunities. Slide 16 offers more detail on Brand Avenue Studios, which we launched with an in house team of writers and designers to essentially produce tailored results driven custom video content. The recent examples of niche custom content we've developed include our pea soup series, four part video series deploying that we deployed featuring food and wine content and a multi part lifestyle video series focused on high and bright old content.
We've also launched Feast and Feel, a content channel sharing unique stories, recipes, trend, travel tips from people in our communities across the country who are growing, processing, and producing our food. Products like these are valuable in house offerings that we can use to differentiate our platform and generate new revenue growth. Our three pillar strategies are road map to generate a large base of reoccurring subscription based revenue and long term revenue growth. As I've demonstrated throughout my remarks this morning, he is well positioned with a strong presence in our markets, a solid digital infrastructure, and the right team in place to continue to accelerate our momentum to execute and achieve our long term goals. And now I'll turn over to Tim Millich, Lee's chief financial officer and treasurer, to provide Lee's overall financial position and explain how we plan to execute on our strategy to drive shareholder value.
Thank you, Kevin. As Kevin discussed, we have made tremendous progress over the last year on our digital transformation strategy and enhancing our financial position to ensure we are poised for growth. A major milestone and catalyst for our accelerated transformation was Lee's transaction with Berkshire Hathaway, which we completed in March 2020. Slide 18 is an overview of that transaction and the significant strategic and financial opportunities it created for Lee. The first was significantly increased scale.
Lee Enterprises acquired 31 publications which brought our portfolio up to 77 markets and each came with a strong digital platform that complemented their print reach. In addition, the transaction was immediately accretive to Lee's earnings presynergies. When we closed the transaction, we had originally expected to realize annual synergies in the range of 20 to 25,000,000. However, as a result of our strong operations and strategic vertical management restructuring, Lee realized 103,000,000 in cost reductions within just nine months of closing. We're also driving significant revenue synergies from expanded application of digital advertising and subscription programs across our expanded platform.
Importantly, as part of the transaction, we underwent a comprehensive refinancing, which significantly improved our balance sheet flexibility while enhancing our growth profile. Berkshire Hathaway invested 576,000,000 with the comprehensive financing as part of the transaction, funding the acquisition and providing capital capital to refinance all of Lee's outstanding debt at closing. The refinancing was executed on highly attractive terms with a twenty five year runway, favorable fixed interest rate, no financial performance covenants, and no fixed amortization. The refinancing also consolidated our debt with Berkshire Hathaway as our sole lender, a long term partner who, as Kevin mentioned, knows us well and is committed to our success. As we continue to execute on our three pillar strategy, we expect that our stronger growth profile and more flexible balance sheet will facilitate deleveraging over the long term.
We aim to achieve our target leverage of below two and a half times within five years. In short, the transaction doubled our audience size, strengthened our capital structure, deepened our relationship with Berkshire Hathaway, and created meaningful synergy opportunities that Lee has achieved ahead of schedule. While we have maintained strong execution, the COVID nineteen pandemic had a negative impact on our business and our ability to drive revenue growth we expected in our 2020 fiscal year. That said, as shown on slide 19, we have seen continued positive trends in our revenue since the worst of the pandemic in q three of our fiscal 2020, underscoring the value of our platform for readers, subscribers, and advertising partners. Importantly, we expect revenue in the 2021 to return to year over year growth.
Moving to slide 20, we have a long history of responsibly managing our cost structure. The most recent example of this is in the acquisition targets established in June to realize 100,000,000 of cost synergies by the end of fiscal year twenty twenty one. With our first quarter results announced in February, we had realized a 103,000,000 of cost synergies, exceeding our target and nine months ahead of schedule. One of the key levers we've pulled to control cost is driving efficiencies across our business, particularly since the acquisition of BH Media. In addition to the significant synergies achieved since closing, remain focused on leveraging our larger platform to share resources, centralize certain operations, and reduce our overall cost structure.
While we remain focused on maximizing our efficiencies and reducing the cost structure of our legacy print business, our main priority is to drive long term profitable revenue growth. As a result, we are investing in the team and technology that will enable our digital future. For example, we've invested in new talent to build out our consumer sales organization with talent and product development and a focus on user experience. Also on the consumer side, we're investing in cutting edge dynamic metering technology to drive subscription growth as well as to leverage our first party data to benefit our advertising partners. We're also investing in the marketing teams with the expertise we need to expand our digital advertising capabilities, including top digital sales talent and talent to lead our Brand Avenue Studios custom content division.
With this thoughtful approach, we are a much stronger, leaner organization today than we were even a year ago, and our world class team is aligned around our strategic vision. Turning to slide 21. Our strong foundation and well defined long term strategy puts Lee Enterprises on a clear path to value creation for our readers, users, advertisers, and our investors. Execution of our three pillar strategy will deliver increased subscriptions and advertising revenue, strengthening our base of annualized recurring revenue, and is the pathway to generate long term growth of Lee's total operating revenue. Achieving revenue growth combined with strong cash flow allows us to achieve our long term target leverage of two and a half times within five years.
During this time, we expect to create significant value for our shareholders through conversion of debt to equity. Beyond that, our three pillar digital growth strategy positions us to unlock the full value of Lee's platform and achieve multiple expansion that is in line with our digital first peer companies, creating more value for shareholders. As we embark on the next chapter of Lee's growth, we'll be positioned alongside some of the world's most innovative and pioneering technology leaders and traded on the Nasdaq. We announced this morning that we will begin trading on Nasdaq on Monday, April 19 using the ticker symbol Lee. This will enhance our visibility as a leading digital platform for news and information, exposing Lee to a new audience of investors that recognize the significant long term value potential of our increasingly digital first content and advertising platforms.
Now I'll turn the call back to Kevin.
Well, thank you for joining the call this morning, and now we'll open it up for q and a.
Thank you. At this time, we'll we we will be conducting a question and answer session. As a reminder, if you are accessing this call by webcast, you may submit type questions on your screen. Those questions will be answered during the call as time permits. Participants on the phone will not have the opportunity to ask questions.
And one moment, please, while we poll for questions.
And the first question, will the continued focus on digital only subscribers ultimately cannibalize Lee's print business?
Yeah. I'll jump on that. I would say, no. It's not. You know, we expect to rapidly grow our digital only subscriber base while maximizing the profitability of our full access subscribers, and that's gonna be key to our success.
In the way that consumers engage with our media today, we anticipate, you know, our full access subscribers, while they'll continue to weigh in over time, we think our strategy isn't an either or approach. We were broadening our overall subscriber base. And as I mentioned in my remarks, only 5% of our new digital subscribers were formally full access subscribers, meaning that our growth in total audience is what's happening and not cannibalization of our legacy print business.
With this, did Lee outline new capital allocation priorities? Will you start repurchasing stock?
I'll let Tim weigh in on this one. But overall, we remain committed to using our cash flows to repay debt.
That's right. So our top priority is continuing to reduce our debt. We do expect that our stronger growth profile and more flexible balance sheet will facilitate continued deleveraging over the long term with the goal of reaching our target leverage of below two and a half times in five years. As we said on our last earnings call, we are evaluating the monetization of several non core real estate assets that once sold would generate proceeds that could be used to further accelerate debt reduction. Under our current credit agreement, we cannot initiate a stock buyback program or pay dividends.
However, our agreement has no prepayment penalties. So as we execute on our strategy, we can evaluate credit markets for an even more favorable financing in the future that would allow for some restricted payments like stock buybacks. Next question is you've taken, cost out of the business. Is there more cost reductions that you can do?
I'll answer that. Well, we've managed the team has a proven and strong track record of managing our cost structure across economic cycles and industry changes. As we've mentioned in the past, in June 2020, we laid out a target to achieve a 100,000,000 in cost synergies by the end of fiscal year two thousand and twenty one. We established plans, executed quickly, and realized a 103,000,000 in cost synergies exceeding our goal of nine months ahead of schedule. Living on add to is we're always continuing to manage and look at our cost structure with an effort to drive efficiencies, reduce our legacy print cost structures, at the same time making required highly strategic investments to grow digital revenue that I mentioned in the presentation today.
Can you comment on the current legislation around media companies and their engagement with technology platforms, especially with what we are seeing in Australia and The UK?
Well, we support the enactment of the safe harbor legislation and other legislative efforts underway that'll give Lee and other publishers in the industry the right to collectively bargain with big tech who control the distribution of our content in the digital ecosystem. It's a little difficult to handicap the timing or the outcome. Certainly, we've seen in congress and with our trade association a lot of interest in helping publishers develop a framework for compensation. I'd also add that as you've seen in the press, France, the EU, Canada, and Australia are always are already seeing legislative successes. We think US publishers will benefit as a result of our legislation as it moves through congress.
How does Lee think about industry consolidation? Also, has Alden, who is active in the space, approached Lee about purchasing the company?
Well, Lee's board of directors is always are always evaluating ways to maximize shareholder value. The board and management team are aligned as we've demonstrated on the three core strategy in today's presentation. We're confident that'll serve as the best as the best path forward, unlock full value on Lee's platform, achieve multiple expansion that is in line with our digital transformation and in line with digital first peer companies that will ultimately create shareholder value. And as we said on earnings calls in the past, we're evaluating the monetization of several non core real estate assets once sold and would generate any proceeds of that to further reduce debt. With respect to all of them, as a matter of policy, we don't comment on potential m and a.
The next question, what are the benefits of moving to Nasdaq?
Well, first, our shares are expected to begin trading on Nasdaq listed security on April 19 with our common stock continuing to trade under the symbol Lee. Importantly, this transition will have no impact on the Lee's stock price or value. As I've said in the presentation, when we execute our digital transformation, this move will enhance our visibility as a leading digital news and information provider, exposing Lee to new digital audience investors that recognize the significant long term value and potential of our increasing digital first content and advertising platforms.
Last question, why should investors be bullish on low on the local media opportunity?
Well, first of all, you know, our focus is on delivering valuable, highly intensive local original news and information. Over the past year, we've demonstrated readers continue to demand and consume our local news and information. We really are uniquely positioned to win the local media space, significantly less competition, as I said in my remarks, for reader and advertiser attention to pay to compared to major metro markets. And I think we're much more resilient to macroeconomic trends. You know, that economic landscape and media landscape is rapidly changing, and that evolution will continue as audience and advertisers shift their dollars from print to digital.
The lead's proven to be flexible, forward thinking, nimble, and rethinking, repositioning, redeveloping our business with a digital first mindset. As I mentioned in my in my remarks, we're the fastest growing digital subscription platform in local media. Our digital age subscribers grew more than 69% in each of the last five quarters. We're optimistic we have the right markets, the right talent, the right strategy that has positioned Lee for top line revenue growth. And as Tim laid out on our presentation, top line revenue growth will translate into value creation for our shareholders as we deleverage and see multiple expansion.
That is, it from the the questions. I'll turn it over Kevin for closing remarks. Well, I appreciate everybody jumping on
the call today, and I appreciate your interest in Lee. As I said, we're very excited about our future. And, again, thank you for joining.
Thank you all for joining us this morning. We appreciate your interest in Lee and look forward to updating you on our progress as we execute our strategy and deliver on the value of our superb platform.