2016ANNUAL REPORT PORTFOLIO OVE RVIEW NEW MEDIA REACH OF OUR DAILY OPERATE IN O VER 535 MARKETS N EWSPAPERS HAVE ACR OSS 36 STATES BEEN PUBLISHED FOR 100% MORE THAN 50 YEARS 630+ TOTAL COMMUNITY PUBLICATIONS REACH OVER 20 MILLION PEOPLE ON A WEEKLY BASIS 130 D AILY N EWSPAPERS 535+ 1,400+ RELATED IN-MARKET SERVE OVER WEBSITES SALES 220K REPRESENTATIVES SMALL & MEDIUM BUSINESSES SAAS, DIGITAL MARKETING SERVICES, & IT SERVICES CUMULATIVE COMMON DIVIDENDS SINCE SPIN-OFF* $3.52 $3.17 $2.82 $2.49 $2.16 $1.83 $1.50 $1.17 $0.84 $0.54 $0.27 Q2 2014 Q3 2014 Q4 2014 Q1 2015 Q2 2015 Q3 2015 Q4 2015 Q1 2016 Q2 2016 Q3 2016 Q4 2016 *As of December 25, 2016 DEAR FELLOW SHAREHOLDERS: New Media Investment Group Inc. (“New Media”, “we”, or the “Company”) continued to execute on its business plan in 2016. As a reminder, our strategy includes growing organic revenue and cash flow, driving inorganic growth through strategic and accretive acquisitions, and returning a substantial portion of cash to shareholders in the form of a dividend. Over the past three years since becoming a public company, we have consistently delivered on this strategy, and we have created a total return to shareholders of over 50% as of year-end 2016. Our Company remains the largest owner of daily newspapers in the United States with 125 daily newspapers, the majority of which have been published for more than 100 years. Our local media brands remain the cornerstones of their communities providing hyper-local news that our consumers and businesses cannot get anywhere else. With the growth of Propel Business Services, our small and medium sized business (“SMB”) solutions provider, we now also serve over 220,000 SMBs in these local communities and beyond. ORGANIC REVENUE AND CASH FLOW GROWTH New Media continues to diversify its revenue base away from traditional print advertising, with that segment dropping to 48% of our total revenue in 2016, due to our increased focus on building our stable and growing revenue segments. We had notable growth in 2016 within Propel Business Services (“Propel”) and our events division, GateHouse Live. In addition, our subscription revenue, driven by our unique local content, remains our single largest revenue category, and continues to grow. Propel is our fastest growing business and we remain very excited about its future contributions to our company. The business helps SMBs solve their most common and pressing challenges from navigating their digital marketing needs to managing their current and targeted customer base, among other things. In 2016, Propel achieved revenues of $53.0 million, marking a 69.1% year-over-year growth. We believe Propel is uniquely positioned to serve the over 2 million SMBs in our local communities due to the already trusted partnership of our newspaper brands and our dedicated, local sales representatives. GateHouse Live is our newly created events division, which specializes in delivering world-class events for the media industry and the communities they serve. This division was only recently launched in 2015 and has already grown to host 120 events in 2016. Through continued creation and expansion across the country, it is set to double both in revenue and number of events in 2017. Demand within our communities is strong for these events, with one of our more popular offerings, ‘Best of Preps’, which highlights the top athletes within the community, being held in more than 20 markets this year. Within the traditional newspaper business, New Media continues to provide our communities the high quality, comprehensive, hyper-local news they rely on. Our continued focus on providing this unique content has kept our products relevant and valuable to both the consumers and businesses in our markets. The Company continues to generate substantial free cash flow across our portfolio which has allowed us to continue to successfully implement our strategy including raising the dividend for the third consecutive year. Though traditional print revenues continue to decline, we do see our ability to achieve organic revenue growth, thanks to the success we are seeing in our other divisions, primarily driven by Propel. INORGANIC GROWTH THROUGH STRATEGIC AND ACCRETIVE ACQUISITIONS 2016 was a busy year for us, completing our largest number of acquisitions in any single year, and bringing our total acquisitions above $735 million since inception. We continue to remain disciplined in our approach to acquisitions with our average multiple at 4.0x the seller’s LTM As Adjusted EBITDA, the midpoint of our stated acquisition range. The Company acquired several notable papers this year with long and storied histories of serving their communities for over a century. The Erie Times-News (PA), The Fayetteville Observer (NC), and the Columbia Daily Tribune (MO) are all flagship daily newspapers with award-winning journalism and strong community relationships. We also acquired the assets of Harris Enterprises, which included six newspapers-of-record in the central Kansas and eastern Iowa regions. New Media was honored to be trusted by each of the previous family owners of these publications to carry on their tradition of providing quality news coverage and editorial content and to welcome these communities and employees into our growing family. New this year was an opportunity for us to acquire strong business journals, creating our business-to-business media division, BridgeTower Media. We acquired The Dolan Company, Journal Multimedia and the Rochester Business Journal which is allowing us to cover the legal, financial, real estate, and government affairs sectors across 20 different markets. We now have 44 print and digital publications and are able to provide business and marketing services in addition to high quality and trusted journalism for our businesses. BridgeTower Media has now grown to become a $75 million division for us. One of the very exciting prospects for this group is that it provides a tailor- made customer base for Propel, as business publication subscribers typically are small business owners. To further strengthen our offering for SMBs through Propel, we acquired ThriveHive, an award-winning marketing software designed specifically for small businesses, for $11.8 million in Q1 2016. The technology has been the perfect complement to Propel’s ‘Do-It-For-Me’ approach, allowing us to connect with smaller businesses looking to run their own digital and contact market campaigns. Propel now offers an even wider product suite to meet the needs of SMBs, and is a full-service software and technology platform poised to continue on its successful growth trajectory. New Media is well positioned to continue to take advantage of the acqusition opportunities we see in the pipeline with over $200 million of liquidity as of year-end 2016. RETURN OF CAPITAL TO SHAREHOLDERS IN THE FORM OF A DIVIDEND New Media continued to return cash to our shareholders, increasing the dividend in Q3 2016 to $0.35 and declaring a total of $1.36 in dividends for 2016. Since our spin-off, the Company has returned $3.52 in cumulative dividends and grown the dividend by 30%. We remain committed to growing free cash flow through the organic and inorganic initiatives spoken of above, which will allow us to continue to support and grow our dividend in 2017 and beyond. 2017 AND BEYOND New Media has launched several new businesses over the past few years that are now becoming meaningful contributors to revenue and poised to become meaningful contributors to EBITDA and cash flow as well in 2017. We are excited and optimistic about our business from an organic perspective and have a solid liquidity position which will support the attractive acquisition opportunities we have in the pipeline. By creating over 50% in total returns for shareholders since our inception, we have outperformed both the S&P 500 (34% total return) and Russell 2000 (26% return). We believe New Media remains an attractive total return vehicle that will drive substantial returns for our shareholders. Michael E. Reed Chief Executive Officer and President February 25, 2017 CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS Certain items herein may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding the company’s future business strategy, expected revenue trends and our ability to continue to grow free cash flow, EBITDA, and our dividend and deliver shareholder returns, growing our digital marketing and services business and events business, pursuing and completing future acquisitions and strategic opportuni- ties, and the availability of such acquisitions and opportunities and the expected benefits associated with acquisitions and strategic opportunities, and liquidity and our ability to pay dividends and fund acquisitions and strategic opportunities. These statements are based on management’s current expectations and beliefs and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward- looking statements, many of which are beyond our control. The Company can give no assurance that its expectations will be attained. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements contained herein. For a discussion of some of the risks and important factors that could cause actual results to differ from such forward-looking statements, see the risks and other factors detailed from time to time in the Company’s Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Furthermore, new risks and uncertainties emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for the Company to predict or assess the impact of every factor that may cause its actual results to differ from those contained in any forward-looking statements.