Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Julian Allen – Spitfire Capital.
Julian Allen – Spitfire Capital
I have a question related to your second half outlook, which is you are obviously signaling that the current quarter will be weaker than last year by about $3.0 million, yet your hope for the full year is that you can make up for that in the fourth quarter. Can you give us a sense of into which businesses you have that kind of visibility going into the fourth quarter and what are the variables that could drive either strength above that number or, conversely, weakness below that?
Joseph D. Frehe
Let me clarify. We're ahead by approximately $3.0 million or so in the first six months and we're saying that we will lose that ground in the third quarter. So to clarify, after three quarters, we will be very close to flat for the year. So it's not as if there's any ground that needs to be made up in fourth quarter to continue to hopefully strive to be flat year-over-year, which as we said from the beginning, would be a very solid year, obviously in an extremely tough media environment.
Obviously we don't need the color, so I won't go into too much detail, but we are obviously doing well in our Media segment in some pretty significant headwinds when even the interactive numbers that came out for the first half of the year for the industry were actually down.
So we're really happy with our core business, the fact that it's overcoming these declines across the board. However, some of the declines that we've experienced in newspaper, as an example, in the third quarter that's a very big quarter for newspaper, so since it's such a big quarter, we can't offset those declines with the gains that we're going to get, for example, in Interactive or Front Line.
So that's the reason why Q3 will give back some of the gains that we had in the first two quarters.
As far as visibility for the fourth quarter, unfortunately, with our business you don't have great visibility relative to, say, an up-front television type of business. However, we can look at the activity that we do have in things like Channel One, what's been booked, what hasn't been booked, versus a year ago. Same with Interactive, which is obviously very close to markets and not a lot of it's booked in fourth quarter at this stage.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
