How We Fund Our Publications

Teaser

Beach Media sustains its student journalism through a strategic mix of advertising, sponsored content and community events. By setting clear financial goals for the publications, the business department balances student fee funding with earned revenue to ensure long-term editorial independence and creative growth. 

The Foundations of Student Media Funding

When people hear the word revenue streams, they often think of money, math and complicated corporate jobs. But at the end of the day, funding revenue streams is really about one thing and that is figuring out where the money comes from and how to keep it coming in consistently. At Beach Media, we do a great job of funding our media. If you’re wondering where the line between creating media and funding gets boring, here at Beach Media, it never does. The real strategy comes into play when we are able to have a happy medium with funding our revenue streams. Student journalism doesn’t just run on passion, it runs on accountability, planning and balancing our funding and we have so many great opportunities for people to engage with our business. We create such a strong foundation when it comes to giving back to the community, such as having fun events on campus and feeling accomplished with our money. We start off simple with the annual and semester goals, then our issue and channel goals, setting individual goals, and commission and structure procedure. Have you ever wondered if our revenue streams are consistent with the Long Beach Current, ENYE and DIG? Well, we can proudly tell you that with our annual and semester goals at Beach Media, we are able to stay on track to meet those goals, which leads to great stability with student funding. 

Strategic Revenue Goals for Our Publications

Our Advertising Sales Goals for the academic year are always our primary goal. Advertising is the main form of revenue generation, so for the Long Beach Current, our goal is $50,000 with a total budget of $35,000. In order to fund these streams we sell print ad space, promote our Coupon Book, SOAR, sell digital banner ads, we offer sponsored content opportunities, partner with local businesses and build long-term advertiser relationships. With all of this, it gives students a change to engage with all our options and stay consistent on funding. We even sell Grad Grams, which are a special graduation-themed product sold by the Long Beach Current. This allows family and friends to congratulate graduating students with a personalized message and photo in a commemorative space in the paper and online. We have been working on our Grad Grams this spring for the upcoming 2026 graduation. For ENYE, the advertising goal is $15,000 with a budget of $48,000. When funding this, we sell print issues. By putting this into action, we do our sales outreach which means we contact different companies either worldwide or local to see if they are interested in partnering for whichever advertisement we are selling at the time. We even get in contact with small, family owned businesses who are looking for something to boost their revenues as well. We move on to highlighting website ads, sponsored content and promote our revenue streams with engaging content on our lovely social media pages. These consist of Instagram, Tik Tok, LinkedIn and more. For our DIG MAG, the goal is $30,000 with a budget of $82,000. To fund these revenue streams we hold certain events which put DIG in the spotlight. Events such as ‘Espresso Yourself’ which takes place during the spring semester. This event highlights meeting the creatives behind campus media and shining light on all their dedication. We also have DIG magazine launch events during the fall semester where we made friendship bracelets and designed DVDs, and even future events that will take place when we have our Spring ENYE launch. Our team puts in so much hard work and effort and to see these events bloom in the best ways, it gives Beach Media a chance to look forward to them. 

Sustainability and Editorial Independence

With advertising, sponsorships, partnerships, and more, we are able to create these accomplishable goals with the help of our community. Our earned revenue is something we are specifically good at and the outcome is always satisfying for our team. The persistence that goes into advertising sales, sponsored content, and special additional ads does not go unnoticed and continues to provide support toward funding our revenue streams. These approaches allow us to maintain editorial independence with our creativity, but also while working toward long-term financial sustainability. When you look at it all together, funding Beach Media is really about responsibility. We’re trusted with student fee money, and we work to supplement that through advertising and fundraising so we can keep improving what we produce. It’s a team effort. From sales outreach to special projects, we grow on campus together. Every stream plays a role. The goal isn’t just to meet a budget number, but to make sure student journalism here stays sustainable and continues to represent our campus the right way. We want our community to grow and adapt, and by funding our revenue streams consistently in the best way, Beach Media is able to stay flexible and stable.