How Daily Memphian CEO Eric Barnes Grew a Robust Nonprofit News Outlet with a Paywall and a Base of Loyal Subscribers

In the eighth episode of the State of Local News Podcast, host Tim Franklin—Professor, John M. Mutz Chair in Local News, and founding director of the Medill Local News Initiative—speaks with Eric Barnes, CEO of The Daily Memphian.

Barnes joins Tim Franklin to discuss how The Daily Memphian has become one of the country’s most successful local digital news organizations. He explains how the nonprofit has built a diverse revenue model centered on subscriptions, advertising, events and philanthropy, and why he believes nonprofit news organizations can—and in many cases should—charge readers for their journalism. The conversation explores The Daily Memphian’s launch in competition with The Commercial Appeal, its paywall and subscription strategy, the challenges of declining search and social media traffic and how the organization is approaching AI. Barnes also discusses the state of the local news industry and why he remains optimistic about the value of trusted local journalism.

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  Hello everyone and welcome to episode seven of the Medill State of Local News Podcast, where we discuss the business of local news with the nation’s top news executives, entrepreneurs and thought leaders. I’m your host, Tim Franklin, the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, home of the Local News Initiative.

  In this episode, I'm delighted to welcome one of the most innovative CEOs of a relatively young local digital-only news organization, Eric Barnes of The Daily Memphian, which Politico has called one of the best local news sites in the country and which The New York Times described as driving a shift in the digital media business. The Medill State of Local News Report also designated the Daily Memphian last year as one of its national bright spots. Eric is the host of a weekly TV news program “Behind the Headlines” on WKNO in Memphis. And Eric is the author of four novels. His book, “The City Where We Once Lived,” was one of the most downloaded books in 2020 on Amazon. He's also pinned numerous short stories. So, Eric, my first question to you is: When do you sleep exactly?

  Tim Franklin

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  I sleep pretty well actually, but I do drink a lot of espresso. My espresso is probably about eight shots a day to kind of get everything done.

  Eric Barnes

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  I know what we're doing right after this podcast!

  The Daily Memphian is often held up as the avatar of a successful local digital news site. You're a nonprofit news organization with a diverse revenue stream, including digital subscriptions, a robust digital subscription base, local foundation support, individual donors, advertisers and community events. In only eight years, from the outside, it looks like you've built a very highly sustainable local news organization.

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah, we like to think so. I mean, we often describe ourselves as a nonprofit that acts like a business.

  We wanted to do it, when we started looking at this, as a for-profit. And the math is really difficult if you're going to do it and reach the whole community.

  But we said, well, we saw a lot of nonprofits out there that were raising 80%, 90%, 100% of their money. That's a tough, tough go. We have about a $6 million budget now.

  So we started with $7 million in philanthropy, but we promised people we would work really hard to build a business. And that's what we've always done. I mean, I've never run a nonprofit. This is my first time. I've been on nonprofit boards.

  So now we're 50% subscriptions, 25% advertising and events and 25% philanthropy. So it's a good mix.

  I'm sometimes surprised more people haven't pursued that mix. Certainly, The Baltimore Banner has. There are some other really good examples. But when you say nonprofit, in our world, people think, "Oh, okay, yeah, you're selling T-shirts and you're going to the foundations and you're doing reader drives."

  That's a tough go, building a newsroom of 40 people and all the other things that go into building a news site.

  Eric Barnes

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  Yeah, absolutely. I do want to get into that more in a second, because I think a lot of nonprofits are started by well-meaning journalists who are very good journalists, but maybe don't approach it as a small business, which is effectively what it is, and then end up becoming overly reliant on philanthropic dollars, which can ebb and flow.

  So when you started this, you did something pretty risky. You took on an established legacy local newspaper, The Memphis Commercial Appeal, owned by the nation's largest newspaper publisher, USA TodayCo, formerly known as Gannett. So now, eight years later, where do you stand vis-à-vis The Commercial Appeal?

  Tim Franklin

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  Well, I always want to say that I don't fault anyone in that newsroom. They have some really great journalists, and there's 20-something journalists still in Memphis. And that makes Memphis not a news desert in many ways.

  We compete really hard with them. Our journalists—we've hired some back and forth. We also have a business journal, a local weekly and MLK50, among others. Memphis is not a news desert, in a really good way. And it says a lot about Memphis.

  What happened was The Commercial Appeal went from Scripps to the Journal Media Group, then GateHouse and Gannett combined, and then they got it. So it was like five—whatever that is—four owners in five years or something like that. That's really difficult for a publication.

  And the headwinds for the big chains are heavy. And the people in Memphis, Mark Russell (Executive Editor of The Commercial Appeal in Memphis), the really great regional editor there, they didn't make those problems.

  So it's great for us in a lot of ways because it keeps us honest. It keeps us competing with them. And I think they would say similar things about competing with us.

  Eric Barnes

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  Were you worried about taking on a legacy, established…

  Tim Franklin

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  We weren't. We weren't, because through no fault of the people in Memphis, they had really messed up the brand. They'd really disconnected from what they did.

  They launched the Tennessee Network. So they owned Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville—about six papers in Tennessee—and they started sharing content. They started putting "Top 10 rooftop bars in Nashville" in the Memphis paper. They started putting barbecue stories about Memphis in the Knoxville paper and all around that.

  And nobody liked it. People in Memphis didn't. It's like anywhere I've ever lived. I grew up in the state of Washington, Alaska and California. Eastern Washington hates Western Washington. I mean, in New York, when I lived there, Manhattan is very different than Upstate New York.

  All states are geographic entities, but the cities within them are often competitive and very different.

  And that's also true in Memphis. That was sort of the final blow for people, I think, was that they were sharing all this content. That was on top of going from 250 people to, at the time we launched, I think they were at about 40 or 45 or something like that.

  And the paper was getting thinner, getting slower to be delivered and all these kinds of headwinds that everybody went through that made it—I won't say nothing was easy about launching The Daily Memphian—but from a competition point of view, the city, we were perfectly timed just because of the mistakes that Gannett had made.

  And they've since rolled back a lot of that. They don't do as much sharing of content. They are very Memphis-centric. They've hired some really good people there. But that teed us up for success, frankly.

  Eric Barnes

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  And I'm pretty familiar with Tennessee, and Knoxville's a pretty long drive from Memphis. So going to a rooftop bar in Knoxville, probably not very feasible.

  So talk a little bit about where you are vis-à-vis The Commercial Appeal. How many journalists do you have?

  Tim Franklin

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  We're about 40 full-time. That's everything—photographers, digital producers, reporters, editors—another 10 to 15 regular contributors of some sort.

  Eric Barnes

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  Okay. And what about on the business side?

  Tim Franklin

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  It's about 12. That's ad reps, business manager, technology, marketing, customer service.

  One thing we do, which I always tell people, one secret to our success was having real live Memphians do customer service in our building. They're literally down the hall from me, and you get the feedback from the readers because subscriptions are so important to us.

  We vary from 50% to 55%, depending on where we are.

  Eric Barnes

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  So you're roughly twice as large in the newsroom?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah, roughly twice. They also have a backend. They do more shared (services). Their digital producers are all in very shared offices.

  So we are bigger than them in terms of people on the ground in Memphis, but they have some good people.

  Eric Barnes

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  So I want to drill down a little bit on how you built your subscriber base, which is really unique, I think.

  Unlike some other nonprofits, you have a paywall. I want to go deep on paywalls here in a second. But I looked it up online. It's $178 annually to subscribe, or $14.83 a month. Not sure why you didn't do $14.99 a month.

  Tim Franklin

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  No, we got you there. So it's $178 per year, which is the equivalent of $14.83 a month. If you pay monthly, it's $17.

  It depends on where you are on the A/B testing and the offers. So we're trying to get you into an annual. Our annuals are the sweet spot.

  Eric Barnes

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  Are most people annual or monthly?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah, probably 65% to 70% of our subscribers are annual, which is what we want.

  Eric Barnes

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  Okay. So what you're charging is not super cheap.

  Tim Franklin

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  No.

  Eric Barnes

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  So it means that people are really making an investment in you. So how many subscribers do you have now?

  Tim Franklin

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  We're at 16,000 paid subscribers. That represents probably 30,000 people. And then we've got another 50,000 or 60,000 people who are free registered users. They get basically four free articles a month.

  And then there are about 160,000 email subscribers who get one of our many, many newsletters—daily, weekly, monthly or ad hoc.

  Eric Barnes

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  Yeah. Okay. And then how much revenue does that generate a year?

  Tim Franklin

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  About $3 million.

  Eric Barnes

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  And what percentage of the total did you say that was?

  Tim Franklin

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  Fifty percent.

  Eric Barnes

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  Fifty percent. Okay. All right. That's a pretty robust—

  Tim Franklin

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  We love subscriptions. When we were formulating this, The New York Times had really turned the corner on subscriptions. You started to see a lot of other publications saying, "Hey, we've got to make more money because The New York Times is doing it."

  And we always wanted that to be the bedrock of our business, because if you anger a subscriber and they cancel, I don't like it, we don't like it, you're down $178, but you can weather that.

  If you anger a foundation—or just not even anger them, they have a strategic plan, they have new priorities and news is no longer part of that—or an advertiser shifts to purely other types of advertising and you lose a $20,000 advertiser, subscriptions are this bedrock of what we do, and it does create a lot of stability and safety for us revenue-wise.

  Eric Barnes

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  So let's talk about that decision to implement a paywall. And this is somewhat controversial, as you probably are aware, in the industry.

  So other metro nonprofits, like here in Chicago, the Chicago Sun-Times, which merged with WBEZ, the public radio station, they went from subscriber-based to nonprofit—I'm sorry—to not having a paywall. The Salt Lake Tribune recently dropped its paywall when they converted to nonprofit status.

  But The Baltimore Banner, which you referenced earlier, does have a paywall and has a very similar model to yours. So talk a little bit more about why you went the paywall route.

  Tim Franklin

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  I mean, again, for the revenue, the consistency.

  We've raised a lot of money in Memphis, probably $25 million-plus over our eight years. That's a lot. It might be approaching $27 million. We've got a handful of money nationally, but it's almost all come from Memphis.

  But there's just—as generous as Memphians have been to us, as supportive as they have been—it's not possible to run a $6 million nonprofit news organization just on philanthropy or philanthropy, sponsorships and events. The money's just not there.

  And I mean, I think Baltimore has almost the exact—I was talking to their CEO recently, I guess that was six months ago—but almost the exact same revenue mix. They're much bigger now because they've got statewide and they're arguably D.C. local news now.

  But there's no other choice. And the controversies about it drive me bonkers.

  Eric Barnes

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  Okay, go into that. Why does it drive you bonkers?

  Tim Franklin

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  Because if you are a local—it's not for everyone. And if you look to be free and open, there are some great success stories. The Texas Tribune being one of, obviously, the granddaddy of them all in terms of free news, a huge philanthropic ability.

  But it's a statewide news site in Texas, based in Austin, with a tremendous amount of wealth. Most other cities, most other communities, don't have that advantage.

  And I get it. I would love to be able to give all our news away for free, but it wouldn't exist. We wouldn't have 40 journalists if we gave it away for free.

  And it's also a bit of a false dichotomy. I mean, you can register to read four free articles. You can sign up for our newsletters and really basically know everything that's going on in Memphis just from the headlines and blurbs. A lot of people do that.

  We have hundreds of thousands of social media followers who are perfectly content just to follow us on social media, and they know what's going on. The restaurant opened, the mayor was elected, schools are back in session, et cetera, et cetera.

  And so we're not The Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal where—and God bless them, I mean, they do a good job. That's great—they lock their sites down really hard. We don't. And that's how we're able to support all the journalism we do.

  Eric Barnes

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  Now, I've had some news executives say to me—and I think well-meaning—that if you're going to be nonprofit, then news has to be free. You don't buy that?

  Tim Franklin

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  No! No.

  I mean, your hospital—most hospitals are nonprofits. They're not free. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital is free. It's an exception. Most theater and arts organizations are nonprofits. They still charge people to get their seats.

  Universities are not free. It wasn't free when I took my student loans out, and it wasn't free when my kids went to USC and NYU.

  There are all kinds of nonprofits. There's no shame in charging.

  Again, if somebody has a—if anything, and you look at local news and the mistakes that the newspapers, the local news chains made, it was not pivoting and starting real paywalls soon enough.

  They'll blame the internet. They'll blame classifieds. There's all kinds of things that were beyond the control of the big chains. A lot of it was self-inflicted.

  They walked away from that subscription revenue. They made all their content free. They gave it to Google and Facebook and all the other social media platforms, and suddenly they looked up and they'd reduced their staffs by 90%.

  Eric Barnes

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  Yeah. I think there was an assumption that advertising would support local news, that it would be like broadcasting—that local advertisers especially would support the content that they put up on the web.

  But the problem now is that you've conditioned people, in many cases, that news is free. And then to turn around and get them to pay is difficult.

  Which actually leads me to my next question. So I geek out on news consumer polls, and we conduct some of those at Medill. And I've seen surveys, including our own, that show somewhere between about 11% and 15% of households pay for local news. This is national.

  Does that worry you, that maybe there's a cap on how much you can really grow subscription dollars?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah, I think it does. And I think there probably is a cap on it.

  We hope to launch a premium tier. I mean, The New York Times, again—I mean, all my good ideas I try to steal from The New York Times—where they're putting tiered other options in there.

  So could we get a couple thousand people to pay not just $178 but $278 because there's some premium content and get a bit more revenue there?

  I think we can grow from 16,000, but it's difficult.

  And you look—I can't remember the number—a couple years ago, The New York Times, which all of us in our world, of course, read and subscribe to, and we might be frustrated, but they are what they are. They're just an incredible source of news and quality journalism across every front.

  I think they reached something like 10% of households. That's, I think, kind of shocking probably for some people because we think of The New York Times as being so ubiquitous and so dominant.

  They might be more than that now, but I know a couple years ago it was give or take 10% of all U.S. households.

  Eric Barnes

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  Yeah. Yeah. So are you surprised that more local digital startups haven't adopted your business model?

  Tim Franklin

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  Baltimore Banner met with us before they launched, and we told them—they took what we did and they did it bigger, better, differently, but kind of the core stuff.

  I remember going through and spending an hour with their then CEO and just like, "Here's everything we did wrong. And then we'll get to the stuff we did right."

  And other people—Ken Doctor and his stuff out West, Block Club—other people have done it.

  So I don't want to say we were the right model for Memphis at the right time, and we still are. Other communities are different, and that's fine.

  But I think fundamentally, to just have this almost as a matter of—I'm trying not to swear. I won't swear—dogma, that it is evil, it is bad, it is wrong to have a paywall is, to me, absurd.

  Eric Barnes

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  Yeah. Well, I mean, newspapers had subscriptions for many years.

  Tim Franklin

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  We are a capitalist country, and a lot of things cost money. There are things that cost money that I wish didn't cost money, but that is where we are. And that is how we fuel the economy.

  Our journalists, they're not getting rich, but they're paid. They have benefits. We pay our people.

  To me, it's absurd to write it off if your market can support it, if part of your stuff is behind paywalls or however people do it.

  But you can also make so much content free. And that is part of our mission.

  If we were a for-profit, we'd probably be $199 and we would give away a lot less free content.

  So there's this balancing act that gets lost to some kind of people. When you say paywall, they think everything's shut down. And that's just not true.

  Eric Barnes

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  So what do you give away for free?

  Tim Franklin

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  Well, you can basically get four free articles a month if you register. So you give us your email, no credit card, you'll get four free articles a month.

  We've made all of our election coverage free in the past. We're probably moving away from that. We're free in the public schools. We're free in the libraries. We're free in senior living, for people who are on fixed incomes, affordable housing, any of that kind of stuff.

  And again, you can get so much of the email content, social content—which is, you and I are real close to this. Some people are really satisfied. "The mayor did this today about a data center. Click here for the link." They're good with the headline, and they are informed in their way because of that headline.

  And it can frustrate me, but that's the reality. And I still feel like we're providing a really important service just by putting those headlines and blurbs out there.

  Eric Barnes

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  Yeah. I think newsletters are critically important, especially in the AI world, where you may be losing those direct blue links. But newsletters are like this friend that you invite into your inbox every day. It's news that's well curated. It's a quick read. You feel like you're well enough informed that you can have a conversation with coworkers or family or friends.

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah. I mean, it was huge for us. Obviously, everyone's calling the death of email 10 years ago, and it's really been quite the opposite.

  Eric Barnes

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  Yeah, I agree.

  So let's stay on the topic of audience traffic. We've seen these dramatic declines in digital traffic across the country at many of the nation's top news sites—not all, but most.

  We track audience data at Medill. Losses over the last four years are nearly 50% at the 100 largest news organizations, according to Comscore. And some people are calling this the traffic-pocalypse, or various things.

  Are you seeing that?

  Tim Franklin

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  We're seeing some, yes. We're definitely seeing less.

  I mean, we watched Facebook go from a huge source of traffic. They changed their algorithm. It is a tiny source of traffic, frankly, now.

  Twitter, X, or whatever the heck it's called, is almost not a source of traffic for us. More of a source of conversation, especially around sports and some around politics.

  We're seeing less traffic from Google, fewer conversions. Our Google Analytics numbers are down maybe 10%. Our Parse.ly numbers are down more dramatically.

  I will say, though, because we have a paywall and because we've always kept the site from a social media and SEO point of view—we've never allowed the Googles and Facebooks of the world to scrape our entire site to read everything.

  It hurt our Google rank because of it, but because all of our advertising is sold, or 99% of it is sold, in Memphis by ad reps. They're selling the brand, they're selling conversions, but it's not programmatic. And when you're in that programmatic, which a lot of the big chains are in, you have to feed that beast. If you don't hit your numbers by the end of the month, you put up a Taylor Swift story. "Is Taylor Swift going to be in Memphis? Click." No, but she was here two years ago.

  Some empty story that gets clicks, or the pop-up videos, all that feeds that programmatic beast, which makes for a terrible reader experience.

  So if you're going to have a subscription, a serious subscription business that's, at this point, for us, quite expensive—I mean, relatively speaking—you've got to have a really good ad experience.

  We don't love video ads. We don't allow pop-up ads because subscriptions run the day. And our ad reps are on board with that.

  But if you are feeding the beast of programmatic, you are feeding Google everything you can to get more clicks and feeding Facebook and so on.

  And we just made a choice, not because we saw the coming changes in Google—we didn't. We just knew that our reader experience had to be optimized for the reader.

  And so we didn't become as dependent on that kind of traffic.

  Our number one source of traffic still is organic traffic. People just bring up the app, come to the website. Email is a very close second. And Google is, I think, third. And it's inching down definitely. And I would expect that that will continue.

  Eric Barnes

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  I was talking to somebody last week who was expressing concern about the AI world, where people just type in questions and get answers and they're not following blue links to your site. How do you fill the top of the funnel?

  Tim Franklin

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  I mean, for us, it's doubling down on email and doubling down on real-world—what I jokingly but seriously mean—real-world marketing.

  Being at more events, being out in the public. We experimented with some billboard advertising. We experimented with some local TV advertising. We'll continue to just be out there.

  We went to some bus wraps, which we did when we launched. There's other ways.

  If you look at what people are doing, I mean, what they're trying to do is get away from just—how do we go to old-school stuff so we're not so dependent on Google?

  So is it working? Is it blowing the doors off with traffic? No, but it's mitigated our losses.

  Eric Barnes

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  Okay. Speaking of AI, how are you using AI now in your newsroom or on the business side?

  Tim Franklin

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  In the newsroom, we're pretty cautious. I'm real happy to be a follower in terms of AI.

  We're not generating content for the site with AI. What is AI? We use Grammarly. We've used Grammarly forever. There's some assistant-type AI-esque stuff that we use.

  Certainly, if we get big data dumps, public records or whatever, the reporters will throw that in. We just emphasize you've got to go back and double-check everything because I've had that experience.

  I mean, you just go, "It hallucinated," or it drew a bad inference or conclusion.

  On the business side, certainly our tech people use it a ton. It's been pretty transformative.

  I, in my role of doing a lot of data analytics, it's super helpful. It's amazing the amount of mistakes it makes.

  I mean, I'm using a Claude Pro account and you just look at it and go, "That's not right. I don't know what it is, but it's not right."

  And it'll go back and say, "Oh no, you're right."

  So if I didn't have this knowledge of our analytics, having spent a lot of time in there, I would trust things coming out of AI that are totally incorrect.

  Eric Barnes

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  Is that why you're cautious? You just don't trust it yet?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah. Yeah.

  My son's a software engineer out in California, and he uses AI a ton. I mean, part of his job is just to manage AI agents who do all the coding for him. So his productivity has exploded.

  But he described this dynamic to me: if he does too much with AI, he'll get to the end of the week and feel soft. He'll feel like his programming skills are down.

  And I've had that same experience with data analytics and financial stuff, where if you let the AI do too much, you're not learning more. And I'm not making good decisions as CEO. I'm actually more removed from the data.

  So it's this balancing act.

  And again, we don't feed much of anything into the AI models. We try to keep them out. They can get to—I mean, I understand that—but we try very hard to keep them out of our stuff, which, again, continues to hurt our rank on Google.

  But we're willing to live with that because we don't want to give them all our content.

  Eric Barnes

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  Sure, sure. So in the few minutes we have left, I want to broaden the conversation a little bit to the local news industry.

  And you're vice chair of the Local Media Association board, will become chair next year. You're in touch with a lot of local news leaders around the country.

  How would you characterize the state of the local news industry these days, writ large?

  Tim Franklin

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  I mean, there's some great work being done, and there's a great amount of attention being put on the problem.

  There's a bunch of really cool startups, some of them without paywalls, and that's great. And they're making it. So I don't want to say everybody should have a paywall. Back to that.

  So I think there's all this really great stuff.

  And I always joke, we had a young woman from Northwestern who lives in Memphis, a rising sophomore in journalism. She killed it this summer. We would've offered her a job. Her parents probably would've killed us, but we were like, "Come on in."

  And I see all these young people come into the business, and it's fantastic. And they're coming in for all the right reasons, and they're coming in with really great skills and better skills than I had. I mean, way better.

  So I think all that means that local news is going to survive, but it's going to be rough.

  I mean, you look at the changes that are happening to local TV news. Local TV news can be really problematic in communities, with a focus on crime and kind of shallow reporting.

  But they still do tell you early voting starts, election day is today, the superintendent was corrupt—even if they took it from our story. All those things that local news does, I think that's going to be a big challenge for getting content out there with the chaining up of all of them, all the consolidation. Generic content shared across TV stations.

  All that stuff's another challenge.

  And yet people continue to go into local news. They keep reading us, they keep subscribing, they keep signing up for our newsletters.

  And so all is not lost.

  Eric Barnes

• 

  Yeah. What gives you optimism about the future of local news? What do you see happening in the next few years? What gives you hope?

  Tim Franklin

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  I mean, I do think that AI will help in some ways in terms of just the technology on the backend and make it easier.

  When we started, the technology, the platform just to put the site on, we had to write our own. I mean, it was so broken.

  I think more technology that makes it easier for people to publish and get out there will be good.

  I think AI also creates these opportunities to have trusted local relationships in a way that you sort of realize you're disconnected. You can get a generic answer to where you want to go to dinner tonight. But I know, say, Jennifer, and Jennifer always steers me right. So I'm going to go see what Jennifer has to say.

  So I think those kinds of—some news gets commoditized. That's fine. We still do box scores. A handful of people read them.

  What people really want in our sports is our take on what's going on with the Memphis Grizzlies or the Memphis Tigers.

  And that's true of politics, food, all the different areas. I don't think that changes.

  Eric Barnes

• 

  Yeah. I think we're in an era where, maybe in part because of AI, people covet authenticity and original local reporting that you can't get anywhere else. And voice, local voice.

  Tim Franklin

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  I've never understood—I’ve never had anybody explain to me how I could call the mayor of Memphis. I've known him for a decade. I could call him, get him on the phone, talk off the record about a thing going on, then talk on the record and then go with that.

  I don't know how AI replicates that level of trust.

  Maybe I'm wrong and I'm just not creative enough, but I don't see that being changed.

  Eric Barnes

• 

  Well, Eric, thank you for taking the time this morning.

  Tim Franklin

• 

  Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Really enjoyed the conversation.

  Eric Barnes

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  And thank you to the audience for your time today and for sharing some of your valuable time with us. You can find a new episode of this podcast every month on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and the Medill Local News Initiative website. Please be sure to hit the like and subscribe buttons. I want to thank our supporters of the Local News Initiative and this podcast: the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Joyce Foundation. Thank you for your support and thank you for being here. We'll see you again next month.

  Tim Franklin

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