Turning ideas into dollars with new business models

There's no hotter topic now in the media industry than digital agencies, Greg Retsinas, digital director of Sonoma Media Investments, Santa Rosa, Calif., told attendees during the closing session of the SNPA News Industry Summit.

Retsinas joined Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Pew Research Center's Journalism Project, to talk about ways newspapers can turn ideas into dollars.

Their segment on the program focused on the Pew Research Center's search for new business models that ranged from sales force restructuring to rebranding the print product to Web consulting for local merchants.

The study focused on four newspapers: The Naples (Fla.) Daily News; The Deseret News, Salt Lake City, Utah; The Columbia (Tenn.) Daily Herald; and The Press Democrat in Santa Rosa.

Jurkowitz said the study was an outgrowth of some work that had been done in 2012 on digital advertising revenue.  The study showed that, for every $1 an average newspaper was gaining in digital ad revenue, it was losing $7 in print revenue.  So, the Pew Research Center began looking at newspapers that were having success in this area.

He shared the success publishers in Naples, Columbia and Salt Lake City are reporting.

Retsinas shared The Press Democrat's success with its digital agency.  The paper formed its agency in response to repeated requests from local businesses that were asking for solutions outside of advertising.  "They were asking for help with their websites, with their search engines, with social media, with their email marketing, with reputation management, and our answer for years was always 'we know a guy.'"

That guy, Retsinas said, was about two blocks away and had a big business that kept getting bigger and bigger.  He kept getting wealthier "and taking our clients' business away from us.  After awhile, we thought: 'Why don't we start doing that ourselves?'"

The paper opened its own digital agency, hired the competitor's best people away and took the business in-house. To really move the needle and make it a strong revenue stream, Retsinas said the paper did six things that made the paper very unique in the media industry.

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