Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Our first question comes from the line of Victor Miller - Bear Stearns.
Victor Miller - Bear Stearns
Thanks for taking the call. Political up $1.5 million and retrans $700,000; new media, $1.75 million; it’s about $4 million in new revenue streams coming in. You had mentioned, Matt, I think a specific number for national, $16.2 million. It seems like out of all of the places that was the most challenging part of the business. Maybe you can talk about what’s driving that?
Secondly, Perry, can you give us a sense of how the political, given the fact Obama and Clinton are still in a protracted battle for the win there, is that been a net-positive or net-negative to your company in your mind?
And lastly, with stock here at $5.70, obviously you’ve been putting above average growth rates for sometime and cleaning up the balance sheet in a significant way. With the stock here much closer to its 52-week low than its 52-week high, but given the reality that your float is very small, is there anything you can really do in terms of repurchasing shares or is that just kind of not a discussion given the float and the size of the overall share base? Thanks.
Perry Sook
Let me start and answer those in reverse order and then Matt can certainly jump in. We discuss the possibility and potential of repurchasing shares all of the time. What is the best use of free cash flow available to us in 2008? The bulk of the free cash flow obviously was going to retire the Applicable High Yield Discount Obligation that we did on April 1, as well as finishing our CapEx build-out for DTV.
I think going forward, certainly in 2009, if we enter the year levered less than 5.5 times our CapEx will go from somewhere in the mid 30s to somewhere less than 10. If we do our job on our distribution revenue stream in new media that will backfill potentially two-thirds of the political number we expect to get this year. I think we’ve got lots of opportunities to examine what to do with our free cash flow in 2009.
As it relates to political, obviously, we operate in 3 markets in Indiana and the political spend was very, very good to us in the months of April and May.
In fact we had more political on the books in the month of April than we’ve reported that we ended the first quarter. Where it goes from here, we have marginal exposure to West Virginia and Kentucky, with our Hagerstown and Evansville stations and obviously we have a small operation in Montana.
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