Gray Television, Inc. GTN
Q3 2010 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: (Bishop Cheen, Wells Fargo).

Bishop Cheen - Wells Fargo: You continue to take down your debt and I know you've been through this before in the early part of the decade. At the rate you're going and the amount of political that will not be there next year, even if the issue advertising is stronger than that they've been in an off year. How long do you think it's going to take you to get your leverage ratios where you want them and remind us again where you do want them?

Robert S. Prather, Jr. - President and COO: I'd like them under five, Bishop, on a consistent basis. Based on that Jim could probably give you a better answer, but ideally we'd like to pay some down in '11 and other ideally $50 million range in '12. So, Jim, you might get down consisted into five where we need to be, I guess is the question. Obviously, it depends on the cash flow growing too, so it’d be both sides of the equation.

James C. Ryan - SVP and CFO: No, I think that’s Bishop in large part the key question is just how quickly the cash flow continues to rebound from the depth of the recession. As Bob said, we probably have a modest ability to reduce debt in '11 given at the classic (ops) you’re in the political cycle and then a very strong opportunity to reduce it in '12. If you're looking at on an '08 basis which is where our senior facility is defined, you're probably running – I mean I think it's going to take you at least into end of '12 and you could be in the somewhere in the five, and I'm not sure if you're still below five yet or not, but I think there is definite progress that we can make both in absolute reduction of the dollar amount as we've been showing this year by making two payments voluntarily. And as we continue to ramp up the cash flows from the all-time low of '09, I think we get – felling much more comfortable with the overall leverage picture of the Company as we move through. We're pleased where we are today in the context of where we were a year ago, we're very pleased. I think we'll feel much better as we go through '11 and get into '12 as to where we are in the overall picture.

Operator: Marci Ryvicker, Wells Fargo.

Marci Ryvicker - Wells Fargo: Just a question on the fourth quarter. How do your comps look for the fourth quarter by month? So how did you do in October, November and December of last year is the first question. Then secondly, how do you feel about Q1 today? I know you said that visibility is a little bit limited, but we’ve heard from some other operators, at least a general feeling about how Q1 is?

James C. Ryan - SVP and CFO: Marci, just to kind of give you a feel, again, in October we had, call it, $31 million of political within the month, so that’s $1 million dollar day run rate. That took core local and national excluding the political down by about $1.7 million compared to last year so we’re obviously backfilling against that the rest of the quarter. November is actually, as I said, looking fairly well, actually well in core business. Local is up solid middle single-digits, actually about 7% in the month. National looks like it’s up about 5%, so certainly we’re coming back around from just a massive amount of displacements of political, and even in that one day of selling in November we ended up with about $2 million of political just on the one day, I guess two days we actually had. December is, I think where we’re probably being very cautious right now because of visibility– right now, we're thinking local pace will come in a little bit. November of last year we had – on a relative basis a pretty strong national as things started to really pick up and rebound from the depth of the recession. So, we're being a little more cautious right now with December and our December business core – we've only got about probably 60% to 70% of business written on – business on books right now. So we've got a ways to go, which is very normal to be at this point going into December, but definitely we see November and December looking fairly good and backfilling from just a sheer amount of political we jammed through in October.