In the changing media landscape, news companies are tasked with finding new ways to engage readers and attract revenue. This week’s Webinar, presented by the INMA Advertising Initiative, looked at how regional publishers are rebuilding revenue.

When politically charged news came to Minnesota

Brian Kennett, vice president and head of digital advertising for The Minnesota Star Tribune, launched the new series of Webinars — which will look at how local and regional publishers are finding paths forward — by recounting how the company rebuilt its advertising strategy when the Minnesota became the centre of global attention “for all the wrong reasons.”

“It’s been a unique time,” he said, noting the challenge of attracting advertisers during a time when news coverage focused on topics brands didn’t want to be aligned with.

“I don’t think ever in my career I thought I would walk out of my office … and see reporters practising donning gas masks and flak jackets,” Kennet recalled.

He was speaking of the recent months when U.S. Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE) agents focused immigration raids on the city, eliciting large protests and coming to a head when agents killed when two U.S. citizens. That new reality in Minneapolis forced The Star Tribune to find a way to manage unprecedented traffic while advertising was plummeting.  

Research showed readers wanted lighter, uplifting stories — and advertisers wanted to support local journalism without associating with heavy news stories.

“Minnesota is a state in the U.S. that is third-highest in volunteerism, had the third most Google searches in 2025 for charity,” Kennett said.

So he and his team chose to focus on that to satisfy both audiences and advertisers.

The first major initiative Kennett unveiled was MN Rising, a branded content platform built around positive community impact.

Businesses in Minnesota often do remarkable community work but rarely talk about it publicly. “People don’t like to talk about themselves… they think that it’s bragging,” he explained.

MN Rising created a space to tell those stories. Every piece of content focuses on positive impact without marketing lingo and product promotion.

The newsroom remained protective of editorial integrity and kept its distance. MN Rising was positioned as purely an advertising product, with the content clearly labelled as such.  

The product received a warm response; it launched at the end of October 2025 and recently signed its 41st sponsor. Most exciting, Kennett said, was many of those advertisers were brands the Star Tribune hadn’t worked with in years:

“Brands that we did business with 15 or 20 years ago, really large major national brands, are willing to get behind this type of a solution because it is a unique way to tell your story.”  

The second initiative tapped into something universally loved: high school sports.

Minnesotans rally around their kids, their neighbourhoods, and their teams. Kennett’s team leaned into that and built a dedicated prep-sports brand with livestreaming, video-first storytelling, and a full newsroom staff assigned to the beat.

The new product served a dual purpose: “We’re able to generate revenue from the product, but then we also have this unique ability to generate subscription revenue,” he explained.

During one girls’ hockey game alone, The Star Tribune sold 1,000 new subscriptions. For a local publisher, that kind of single-event conversion is almost unheard of.

This wasn’t just an advertising play; it was a subscription engine, a community builder, and a brand-safe environment, attracting national advertisers that had long abandoned local markets.

“We’ve been able to partner with brands that we normally don’t partner with anymore to drive revenue,” he said. “And the bottom line is it just allows us to do things that we weren’t able to do.”

Sun-Sentinel/Orlando Sentinel rewrite the local advertising playbook

In Florida, The Sun Sentinel and Orlando Sentinel are reshaping their advertising models for a digital-first future.

Dave Karabag, who oversees ad sales, marketing, and ad operations for both publications, set the stage by explaining the market.

The Sun Sentinel’s South Florida market alone is “larger than 36 states based on population” and powered by 60 million annual tourists, three international airports, and some of the world’s busiest cruise ports.

Central Florida, home to the Orlando Sentinel, is one of the fastest-growing designated market areas in the country, with 10 world-class theme parks, a booming semiconductor sector, and a modelling-and-simulation industry few outsiders realise exists.

Together, these markets represent 12.5 million people — more than half the state. And they’re growing at twice the national average.

Even in Florida’s older-skewing markets, print is declining. But instead of treating print and digital as separate channels, his team reframed the conversation entirely.

“We don’t even look at print versus digital subscription anymore. ... We go out there with our full audience, because digital standalone subscriptions have exceeded print,” Karabag said.

Total circulation is growing — not because print is rebounding, but because the organisation is delivering content in the formats readers actually use.

That shift has forced advertisers to rethink their assumptions too. Agencies that once insisted on print-only buys are now seeing the data: Digital editions often deliver more readership, greater frequency, and greater value.

Like many publishers, the Sun Sentinel and Orlando Sentinel have leaned into first-party data, but they have an enviable advantage of recurring audience segments: sports fans, cruise travellers, theme park planners, retirees, and hyper-engaged local news readers.

That data is used to target advertising across their owned-and-operated properties, giving them an advantage that standalone agencies can’t match, he said.

Native content has become one of their fastest-growing revenue streams. Advertisers can get content written anywhere, Karabag said, but distribution is the differentiator:

“Sponsored content along with a trusted local brand is huge for results for clients,” he explained. “Audio and podcasts, video advertising expansion, but also integrating native within our branded content has been so results-driving.”  

Even with so much opportunity, the company carefully evaluates which products will thrive. Instead of launching endless new products, his team is trimming, refining, and reimagining what already works.

“Sometimes instead of just recreating a new product, we just take that same product and change it a little bit,” he said.

Case in point: Explore Florida, a twice-yearly travel magazine. When print performance softened, instead of killing it, they expanded its reach. The magazine now appears in every Tribune e-edition nationwide and is pushed to 1.6 million Tribune subscribers plus 500,000 travel intenders via targeted e-mail. Advertisers saw stronger results and they are looking at further expansion.

Newsletters have become a breakout revenue driver, especially as platforms like Google and Facebook de-emphasise news.

“One of the biggest things we ran into [was that] advertisers didn’t want any kind of breaking news,” Karabag said. So his team reframed breaking-news newsletters as digital billboards: high-volume, high-frequency placements perfect for categories like legal services, healthcare, and political advertising.

Now, it has become a successful way to generate business, “and advertisers are clamouring for it because they can get so much more for it.”

Events, meanwhile, have shifted from large-format spectacles to boutique, high-impact gatherings, offering celebrations that strengthen community ties and deliver measurable value.

Karabag closed with a simple but powerful insight: Prioritisation comes from listening — to advertisers, to sales teams, to the newsroom, and to the audience.

Some products get expanded. Some are shut down. Some get reinvented. But these decisions are made with three things in mind: demand, profitability, and the mission to sustain local journalism.

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