Scared of Santa contests always draw a great crowd! But the Southeast Missourian also knew some families might have a picture-perfect photo with Santa. Since they didn't want to exclude them from the fun, this contest became: Scared of Santa (or Not!).

During one of the idea-packed P2P video conference calls last year, The Roanoke Times shared a holiday promotion called "12Cheers!" It was a contest designed for restaurants to showcase their best cocktails during the holidays – along the lines of the 12 Days of Christmas.

On Sept. 26, SNPA will host a free conference call that will be completely focused on holiday sales revenue. Share one idea for a Halloween, Thanksgiving, Veterans Day, Christmas or other holiday promotion and get the complete collection of ideas at no cost. Get some great new ideas on Thursday, Sept. 26, at 2 p.m. (EDT).

Want to know a little more about the Roanoke contest or how you can sign up for this year's collection of holiday sales ideas? Click on the link below.

Folks, it happened: The key to sustainable local news has been discovered. And it involves making money.

Spoiler alert: It's all about making money, and that takes having people whose job descriptions are specifically devoted to that task – along with tying the money-generating to the journalistic mission. And okay, maybe they haven't found the key: "No organization we spoke to claimed to have found the solution to revenue generation, but each had useful lessons for other civic news organizations at different levels of maturity."

Read more from NiemanLab.

Does your digital subscription strategy focus on getting new subscribers AND keeping them engaged with your brand?

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.

This summer, the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute's Innovation in Focus web series will take a look at the startup and growing pains of a handful of news organizations' new efforts to raise revenue. Those efforts range from membership models and retooling ownership to new ventures and crowdfunding efforts. The Innovation in Focus summer revenue series starts later this month.

Before we launch into best practices, challenges and takeaways from these organizations in the coming weeks, it seems like now would be a good time to set the table to review some of the more standard revenue models that are already part of many organizations' multi-revenue stream portfolio.

These standard models in journalism are part of eight common revenue models, often taught in university business schools as ways to generate revenue. Paying attention to how they work, separately and together, has become an important skill for journalism as the industry continues to retool, redesign and seek ways to grow revenue strategies.