The year-over-year decline results from timing normalization of certain expenses, select growth investments and productivity initiatives as well as dilution from 2023 M&A. Moving to Reuters News, adjusted EBITDA was $61 million, up $21 million from the prior year period with a margin of 27.9%. The AI content licensing agreement I mentioned earlier contributed meaningfully to profit growth, adding approximately 6.5% to order segment margin in the quarter. Global Print’s adjusted EBITDA was $55 million with a margin of 36.4%, an increase of 30 basis points. Excluding foreign exchange impacts, segment margins would have eased lower. In aggregate, total company adjusted EBITDA was $707 million, a 12% increase versus Q4 2022. The combination of Reuters AI revenue and a slight favorability in some of our expenses, contributed to a better-than-expected adjusted EBITDA margin for the fourth quarter.
Turning to earnings per share. Fourth quarter adjusted EPS was $0.98, up from $0.75 in the prior year period. Higher adjusted EBITDA, a lower share count and lower interest expense drove the year-over-year growth. Currency had a $0.02 favorable impact on adjusted EPS in the quarter. Let me now turn to our free cash flow performance for the full year. Reported free cash flow was $1.87 billion, up 40% from $1.34 billion in the prior year period. Consistent with previous quarters, this slide removes the distorting factors impacting our free cash flow. Working from the bottom of the page upwards, the cash inflow from discontinued operations was $40 million, which is an $81 million improvement from the prior year period. Also in the 12 months, we made $90 million of Change Program payments as compared to $324 million in the prior year period.
If you adjust for these items, comparable free cash flow from continuing operations was $1.94 billion, $216 million higher than the prior year period primarily due to higher EBITDA. I will now provide an update on our capital structure and several capital allocation items. As you can see, our capital structure and liquidity position remained quite strong as we exited 2023. We had $1.3 billion of cash on hand at December 31. We have an undrawn $2 billion revolving credit facility, and we also have approximately $1.9 billion of availability on our $2 billion commercial paper program. Our December 31 leverage ratio was 0.8x, below our 2.5x internal target, as noted in our value creation model. We will use approximately $800 million of cash on hand to fund the Pagero acquisition, leaving our leverage ratio well below our target.
Next, I will provide several updates on our London Stock Exchange Group holding. In 2023, we sold 56 million shares for nearly $5.5 billion of gross proceeds. Of the remaining 16 million shares we own, 2.6 million could be sold through exercise of the call options we sold in September, and we have 6.1 million additional shares that are eligible for sale in 2024. Our tax basis on the remaining 16 million shares is approximately $650 million. For your math, we would assume a 25% capital gains tax rate on gains above $650 million. Lastly, the value of foreign exchange hedges held against our LSEG stake were $26 million as of December 31. We currently have approximately 86% of our remaining LSEG position hedged. From a liquidity and capital structure standpoint, we remain in an enviable position with below-target leverage and strong cash flow, bolstered by proceeds from the monetization of our LSEG stake.
We remain focused on value creation, and we expect to continue with our balanced capital allocation approach that includes annual dividend growth, strategic M&A and capital returns. We have ample capacity to pursue all three of these strategies in 2024 and beyond. Steve touched on our approach to M&A and recent Pagero acquisition, so I will focus on the two other key components of our balanced capital allocation approach. We are progressing with the $1 billion NCIB or share buyback we announced last November, having repurchased approximately $500 million worth of our shares as of the end of January. We anticipate completing the program in the second quarter. And finally, today, we announced a 10% increase in our annual dividend to $2.16 per share, up $0.20 from $1.96 in 2023.
This marks the 31st consecutive year of annual dividend increases for the company and the third consecutive 10% increase. The increase will be effective with our Q1 dividend payable next month. Let me conclude with a discussion of our 2024 outlook and a financial framework for our expectations in 2025 and 2026. Starting with 2024, we forecast organic revenue growth of approximately 6%. We see total revenue growth approximately 6.5%, slightly outpacing the organic growth rate due to the benefit from recent M&A, net of the Elite divestiture. We see the Big 3 segments growing revenue by approximately 7.5%, continuing the strong trend of modest acceleration we have seen in recent years. One point to note on the revenue outlook: it is negatively impacted by accounting for the hyperinflationary environment in Argentina, which dilutes our organic revenue growth calculation by approximately 40 basis points.
Absent this impact, our outlook would call for modest organic revenue growth acceleration in 2024 driven by underlying improvement from all GenAI initiatives and acquisitions. M&A is expected to contribute approximately 50 basis points to our 2024 growth. We are forecasting a 2024 adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 38%, down from 39.3% in 2023. Our M&A activity since mid-2023 is expected to be roughly 120 basis points dilutive to 2024 margins, which includes 35 basis points of integration expenses that we expect to fall off within 24 months. As we previewed last quarter, we are choosing to reinvest our underlying operating leverage in 2024 into accelerated organic investments, particularly in the generative AI area. We do not take this decision lightly, but we see significant opportunity through these investments to expand our medium to longer term growth profile.
As I mentioned last quarter, we expect our effective tax rate to rise in 2024 driven primarily by the implementation of OECD global minimum tax regulations across several key markets. We now expect an effective tax rate of approximately 18% this year, up from 16.5% in 2023, but below our initial expectation for 19% discussed last quarter. Moving to capital intensity, we see 2024 accrued CapEx as a percent of revenue of approximately 8.5%. This is broadly a continuation of the level for 2023 with a slight increase related to Pagero. This level of spend includes incremental investments in M&A-related integration and more broadly in product development, including in support of our generative AI product road map. We forecast 2024 free cash flow of approximately $1.8 billion.
This includes an expected increase in cash taxes of roughly $90 million, higher year-over-year CapEx of approximately $90 million and lower dividends from our LSEG stake resulting from the 2023 monetizations. For the CapEx increase, note that approximately two-third of the increase results from integration costs and growth investments in Casetext and Pagero. Let me call out one other modeling note for 2024. We expect to transition approximately $20 million of revenue from our Global Print business into our Legal Professionals segment in 2024. This content has been added to Westlaw, which we believe will provide customers with a richer experience. We see this transition aiding our Legal Professionals segment organic revenue growth by approximately 80 basis points and reducing the growth rate of our Global Print segment by approximately 400 basis points.
This transition is expected to be substantially complete by the end of 2024. Turning to the first quarter. We expect organic revenue growth to be approximately 8%, boosted by the expectation for additional AI licensing revenue at Reuters. We see our first quarter adjusted EBITDA margin at approximately 40%, benefiting from normal seasonal strength from our Tax & Accounting Professionals segment and the Reuters licensing revenue, partially offset by M&A dilution and select growth investments. Looking beyond 2024, we are focused on delivering further revenue growth acceleration and a return to margin expansion. For the 2025 to 2026 period, we forecast an organic revenue growth range of 6.5% to 8% driven by 8% to 9% for the Big 3 segments. We will work to deliver acceleration within this range over the next few years as our GenAI investments pay off and recent M&A scales.
For margins, we anticipate delivering 75 basis points of expansion in 2025, followed by at least 50 basis points annually thereafter. I would note this is an organic outlook and could be impacted by future M&A. We expect our capital intensity to remain at approximately 8%, relatively stable with the recent trend, after some of our acquisition integration spending moderates. We expect our free cash flow to remain robust over the next several years, growing to a range of $2 billion to $2.1 billion in 2026. This assumes some further increase in our effective and cash tax rates beyond 2024, stable capital spending and rising margins. We are also providing medium-term targets for several capital strategy-based metrics. This includes maintaining our 2.5x leverage target and a dividend payout ratio of 50% to 60% of free cash flow.
We are making a new commitment to return at least 75% of our free cash flow annually in the form of dividends and share repurchases, and we target a return on invested capital that is double or more our weighted average cost of capital over time. On this point, the accounting for M&A can depress ROIC in the short-term that we would expect our returns to continue to rise on an organic basis. We look forward to providing more detail around the drivers of this outlook at our planned Investor Day on March 12 in New York City. With that, I will hand it back to Gary for questions.
Gary Bisbee: Thank you. Jennifer, we are ready to begin the Q&A.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] And we will go first to Scott Fletcher from CIBC.
