Recognizing that the news industry must change their revenue sources, Jim Moroney, CEO of A.H.Belo and publisher and CEO at The Dallas Morning News, continues to search for the answer to this complicated problem.

“So what is the right business model? You got audience in both places, one maybe monetizes more than the other,” Moroney said. “So should we focus on print or should we be more focused on digital? What’s the balance?”

Moroney is very much aware of the decline in advertising revenue, print and online, and it is evident in his own publication. Moroney says The Dallas Morning News gets 40 million page views a month. If they put two ad positions on every single page, they generate a total of $7.6 million in one year.

In the grand scheme of things, this amount is less than two percent of total revenue. So his dilemma and major question is what is the right business model? In order to get receive the revenue necessary to sustain The Dallas Morning News, they would need millions or even billions of page views, and Moroney said it himself that getting those numbers was impossible.

So in response to the decline in advertisement revenue, Moroney sought out to diversify their revenue sources. One of his solutions involves the purchasing of new businesses and using the brand of the paper, and by doing so, the Dallas Morning News is able to use the extra profit to sustain the scale of coverage that meets their standards.