Hearst Television Inc., in 2004, enjoyed a year of record financial results, superior journalistic achievements and continued technological innovation. Propelled by new records in Olympic advertising for the Athens summer games and in political advertising directed to our market-leading stations in "battleground" states, Hearst's revenue and earnings surpassed those of 2000.

It was also a record earnings year for Internet Broadcasting, our web partner. Internet Broadcasting was selected to produce and host the Athens Olympic web destination, NBCOlympics.com, which achieved record traffic and advertising revenue. The Internet Broadcasting "network" of Websites, in tandem with our stations' leading on-air weather coverage, also earned record traffic with hurricane updates. The Internet Broadcasting network's average of some 11 million monthly unique users placed it among top national Internet news-and-information destinations such as Yahoo, MSNBC.com, CNN.com and NYTimes.com.

Our stations' weather expertise and that of the NBC station group and key NBC affiliate partners - along with the long term potential of the digital television (DTV) spectrum -- led to a decision to develop local weather channels over multicast DTV "streams". Weather Plus, a series of technologically advanced local weather channels, is being rolled out to DTV viewers in 2005.

In addition to six National Headliner Awards, Hearst stations earned multiple regional Associated Press Awards and Radio-Television News Directors Association Edward R. Murrow Awards. In a major accomplishment, WESH-TV, Orlando-Daytona, which received a 2003 national Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of the Columbia Shuttle tragedy, earned a University of Georgia George Foster Peabody Award and a Society of Professional Journalists award, for investigative reporting.