When Florida lawmakers passed HB 7049 in 2023, many local publishers immediately recognized the potential threat to one of the industry’s most stable revenue streams: public notices. The legislation created a pathway allowing certain notices to be published on government websites rather than exclusively in newspapers, opening the door for counties to move some legal advertising away from local publishers.
For David Dunn-Rankin, president of Central Florida–based D-R Media, the moment represented both a challenge and an opportunity. Rather than treating the legislation as an inevitable loss of revenue, he approached it as a problem to solve — one rooted in relationships, operational realities and a clear understanding of how public notice actually works.
“Every year, there’s always some fire to put out,” Dunn-Rankin said. “There’s always a fire drill during legislative season.”
A relationship-driven approach
D-R Media serves communities between Tampa and Orlando, and Dunn-Rankin has spent years building strong relationships with local government staff and administrators. That connection, he believes, is critical to protecting public notice partnerships when policy shifts. “We’re very hands on. We’re very high touch,” he said. “I like for our legal people to go bring brownies, so that they know us — so that they’re just not a voice on the phone.”
The approach — which Dunn-Rankin jokingly calls his “cookie campaign” — is designed to make sure local partners know the people behind the process. That relationship-first philosophy proved valuable when counties across Florida began evaluating whether to launch their own public notice websites after the new law passed.
In the months following HB 7049, Dunn-Rankin watched several counties begin exploring that path. “About seven or eight counties made the move pretty quickly,” he said.
One of the most consequential discussions unfolded in Polk County, an important public notice market for D-R Media. County commissioners openly debated whether creating a county-run public notice website could reduce costs while also driving more residents to the county’s online services.
As Dunn-Rankin recalled, the logic sounded straightforward: “We’ll save some money,” commissioners suggested, and “it’ll make the county website more useful because people will start going there for information.” But from his perspective, the economics — and the operational realities — were far more complicated.
Breaking down the numbers
Rather than arguing philosophically about the value of newspapers, Dunn-Rankin focused on helping county leaders understand how the new law actually worked in practice. The details, he explained, were far more complex than the simplified narrative that counties could simply move all notices online.
“The law is very confusing,” Dunn-Rankin said. “There’s a lot of different kind of notices. If you’re managing the website, you would have to figure out which ones go on the county website, which ones still have to go on a paper. That’s complex additional work.”
To clarify the situation, Dunn-Rankin walked commissioners through Polk County’s notice volume in three categories, separating notices that legally must remain in print from those eligible for online publication. “There’s three big buckets,” he explained. “Roughly about 20 to 25% still had to stay in a newspaper. About 25 to 30% the county could put on their own website and about half the developer still is paying for it.”
That final category proved particularly important. Many developer-paid notices — often tied to zoning or development proposals — are exactly the notices residents care most about and the ones most likely to generate public attention.
From Dunn-Rankin’s perspective, moving those notices onto a county website would not necessarily reduce taxpayer costs and could even reduce transparency. He framed the numbers directly for commissioners: “You’re not going to save the $150,000. $40,000 is still going to have to go to newspapers. There’s about $50,000 that you can save by publishing them on your own. Then there’s $75,000 that you could put on the county website, but it won’t save you any money. Just create more work.”
Even when he couldn’t get face time with every commissioner, Dunn-Rankin stayed persistent in making the case. “I wrote them 17 handwritten notes,” he said.
Meeting digital expectations
Once Dunn-Rankin clarified the financial realities, he shifted the conversation to what the county actually wanted: a modern digital public notice experience for residents. If Polk County wanted a dedicated notice website, he argued, that didn’t necessarily mean building and maintaining one internally. “So we told them we’d do their county website for free,” Dunn-Rankin said. “They wouldn’t have to spend the resources to build it or maintain it themselves.”
To make that possible, D-R Media partnered with Column, whose platform powers public notice workflows for publishers nationwide. The arrangement allowed D-R Media to remain the county’s operational partner while Column provided the underlying technology.
“Basically, I needed to white-label Column,” Dunn-Rankin said. “D-R Media would be the first line of support, and we’d handle the billing. But I needed to run on proven technology; otherwise I’d have to build it myself. And I’d rather use Column’s, because it works.”
The result was a county-branded public notice site powered by Column’s infrastructure but presented as part of the county’s public information ecosystem. “It looks and feels like a county website,” Dunn-Rankin said. “You would not know that it’s not a county website.”
The technical structure also aligned with Polk County’s IT policies. Rather than integrating directly with county systems, the platform is hosted externally and simply linked from the county’s official site.
“They told us, ‘We don’t want anything going in and out of our firewall,’” Dunn-Rankin explained. “So we host it outside the county’s website, and they just link to it.”
Protecting both revenue and relationships
The outcome was straightforward: Polk County received the digital experience it wanted while D-R Media retained its public notice partnership. “We retained all legals revenue from Polk County, except for one city,” Dunn-Rankin said.
Just as important, the feared ripple effect across surrounding municipalities never materialized. D-R Media expected some of the county’s 17 cities might shift notices to the county platform as well, but in practice most maintained their existing workflow with the newspaper. “Only one of our 17 cities has done that,” Dunn-Rankin said. “It’s business as usual.”
In many cases, the deciding factor was simple: managing notices internally creates additional administrative work for local government staff. “The clerk now has to do that work, and they don’t want to do that work,” he said.
Dunn-Rankin also credits the long-standing relationships D-R Media maintains with local governments. “Our cities like us,” he said. “There wasn’t much incentive to change a workflow that was already working.”
A playbook for other publishers
For Dunn-Rankin, the Polk County experience illustrates how publishers can respond when legislation changes the public notice landscape. Rather than framing the issue as a battle between newspapers and digital platforms, he believes publishers can remain central to the process by helping governments meet their digital expectations. “Here’s what we did in Polk,” he said. “Go do that everywhere and lock the county up.”
By combining education, strong local relationships and modern technology, D-R Media was able to preserve both the partnership and the revenue stream. In an environment where public notice rules continue to evolve, that approach offers a practical model for publishers navigating similar changes.
About Column:
Column builds the technical infrastructure that powers modern public notice, connecting newspapers, governments, legal professionals, and the public through an efficient, compliant platform. Today, thousands of publishers and tens of thousands of agencies, firms, and individuals nationwide rely on Column to keep their communities informed. The platform centralizes notice placement, proofs, affidavits, and billing in one place. By automating high-friction operational steps and standardizing the back office, Column helps publishers protect and grow public notice revenue while making public information easier to access for local communities. We’re reimagining how public information connects people, institutions, and media.
