With its fiscal year running through June, a lot of the fiscal year that Meredith Corporation reported yesterday included the last political campaign cycle, so CEO Steve Lacy had strong numbers to report for the TV division. Broadcasting revenues rose 10.5% to 347.8 million, with non-political advertising up 1.9%, and EBITDA up 16.4% to 131 million.
"Our strategy of increasing local news hours in our markets continues to pay dividends. This strong news presence was instrumental to our achieving record political advertising in fiscal 2007 and a 4 percent increase in local non-political revenues. Meredith Broadcasting has now outpaced the industry average for advertising revenue growth for six consecutive years," said Lacy.
Fiscal Q4 was less hot, but broadcasting revenues were down only 1.9% to 83.8 million, despite the lack of much political advertising. EBITDA declined 3.4% to 33.9 million.
For all of Meredith Corporation, fiscal year revenues rose 3% to 1.6 billion and earnings per share increased 16% to 3.31.
