Newspaper companies know how to sell subscriptions and ads, but they don't necessarily think about selling their own merchandise. Go online to The Post and Courier store in Charleston, S.C., and you'll find all sorts of items that make money.

The Holland Sentinel is a paper out of Holland, Mich., with circulation of about 12,500. In the second year of its Amazing Teachers contest, the paper's team wanted to improve on an already successful campaign – Amazing Teachers. The goal of the contest was to create goodwill within the community, grow the email database, and drive sponsorship revenue month after month.

For a newspaper that routinely writes stories about teachers and emphasizes education coverage, creating an Amazing Teachers recognition program was an extension of that commitment.

"There were good synergies in what we could do on the newsroom side and what we could do on the advertising side," said Orestes Baez, president and publisher of Holland Media Group and The Holland Sentinel in Michigan.

The program in its first two years has been successful enough that this year it will be expanded to nine other GateHouse Media newspaper properties in Michigan. The program allows the public to nominate outstanding teachers and a committee created within the company selects the winners, eight this year in Holland.

In May, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet spoke before the INMA World Congress of News Media audience and shared his dismal prediction concerning the future of journalism-that most local newspapers were going to die in the next five years.

"The greatest crisis in American journalism is the death of local news," he said. "Their economic model is gone."

It's true that the traditional economic model may be gone, but many local and national newspapers are using their ambition and creativity to explore new and exciting business models with hopes that it will create sustainable revenue for many years to come.

E&P spoke with several of these newsrooms to discuss their clever ideas.

Read more from Editor & Publisher.

These shareable campaigns drive big revenue and bigger engagement month after month.

When a 5,000 circulation daily can publish a 30,000-copy, 76-page magazine, the paper is doing something right. That paper is the Enterprise-Journal in McComb, Miss.

Since 2013, the Enterprise-Journal has published the glossy magazine once a year for its county public hospital, Southwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center. It brings in more than $60,000 for the paper and tells stories that otherwise might go unreported, according to Editor Jack Ryan.

The 2019 version came out this month and honored the 50th anniversary of a hospital that draws patients from six Mississippi counties and two parishes in neighboring Louisiana.

Customer data is the foundation for strategically planning, executing and optimizing audience growth and revenue diversification efforts. Unifying, analyzing and deploying all available customer intelligence to optimize a customer journey that is perfectly engineered for each individual – transporting that consumer efficiently from awareness to paid customer status – is essential to financial viability.

At the Mega-Conference, hear how GateHouse Media's investment in customer data is not only supporting digital subscription growth, but is impacting revenue diversification initiatives across the enterprise. Learn how The Dallas Morning News is leveraging marketing automation to fund and enrich digital transformation efforts by extending the print runway.

With football season winding down, sports fans nationwide are turning their attention to college basketball. The TownNews Bracket Challenge empowers local media sites – newspapers, TV stations, radio stations and magazines – to create digital college basketball bracket contests that turn local sports fans into loyal repeat visitors, driving audience engagement and advertising revenue.

As the holiday sales season comes down to the wire, here's a quick way to generate a little more revenue, make readers smile and sell some more papers.

The Bay City Tribune in Texas, which circulates about 4,000 papers twice weekly, filled up two full pages at Halloween with photos of kids in costume, got a major business to sponsor the promotion and made $500. There's no reason the same plan can't work with Santa Claus.

GateHouse Media has a special last-minute deal for SNPA members. Only $100 for all three of its top-quality special holiday sections: Gift Guide, Cookbook and Entertaining, and Holiday songbook