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!).

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.

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.