“Every year, there’s always some fire to put out,” said David Dunn-Rankin, President of D-R Media. “There’s always a fire drill during legislative season.”
D-R Media is a Central Florida publisher serving communities between Tampa and Orlando. Since 2018, Dunn-Rankin has led the company with a practical focus on protecting public notice through strong local relationships and reliable service.
“We’re very hands on. We’re very high touch,” he said, describing a team that prioritizes customer intimacy with county staff: “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.” It’s what he calls his “cookie campaign,” a deliberate approach to making sure local partners know the people behind the process.
That relationship-first operating style was tested in January 2023, when Florida passed HB 7049, creating a new pathway for counties to publish certain legal notices on a publicly accessible county website rather than solely in a newspaper.
The shift introduced a clear operational decision point:
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Counties could build a county notice website to handle categories of notices newly eligible for web publication
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Publishers faced increased risk of notice volume shifting if counties chose to take publication in-house
In the months after the change, Dunn-Rankin saw early adoption firsthand: “About seven or eight counties made the move pretty quickly.”
The Challenge in Polk County
Polk County is a meaningful public notice market for D-R Media.
After HB 7049 passed, Polk County commissioners began openly discussing whether the county should create its own public notice website, an idea that had already gained traction elsewhere in the state.
As Dunn-Rankin described it, the conversation wasn’t hypothetical: the commission discussed it in a meeting and directed staff to explore the project, with the expectation that a county-run site could reduce costs and drive more traffic to county resources.
“We’ll save some money,” Dunn-Rankin recalled them saying, and “it’ll make the county website more useful because people will start going there for information.”
For D-R Media, the risk came down to day-to-day workflow and revenue:
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A county-run site would shift a portion of notices newly eligible for web publication away from the newspaper
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Even partial shifts could reduce public notice revenue and change long-standing county workflows that depended on the newspaper as the default publishing partner
At the same time, Dunn-Rankin recognized a second challenge for counties: the law itself was complicated. County decision-makers were reacting to a simplified “savings” narratives without a clear understanding of what could actually move to web publication alone.
“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.”
D-R Media’s Approach
David’s strategy was to shift the conversation from a vague “we’ll save money” idea to a clear, decision-ready breakdown of what HB 7049 actually changed and what it didn’t.
He walked commissioners through Polk County’s public notice volume in three buckets, separating what still legally had to run in print from what could move online, and—critically—who was paying for each category.
“There’s three big buckets,” Dunn-Rankin said. “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 last bucket mattered for more than dollars. Dunn-Rankin emphasized that many of the developer-paid notices—often tied to zoning and development—are exactly the ones where visibility is most important, because they’re the notices that generate the most public attention and frustration. In his view, moving those notices onto a county website wouldn’t reduce cost for taxpayers, but it could reduce transparency and increase blowback.
From there, he made the math unavoidable:
“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.” And it would risk burying the notices people care most about.
He kept pressing his argument, even when he couldn’t get face time with every commissioner:
“I wrote them 17 handwritten notes.”
The Column Partnership: Give the county the site they want
After making the economics clear, Dunn-Rankin shifted the conversation away from whether Polk County should have a digital notice site and toward how they could get one with the least friction.
If the county wanted a modern, county-branded experience for residents, his view was that it didn’t need to mean building and maintaining a new system internally—or defaulting to a county-run site that bypassed the newspaper workflow.
In other words: the goal was to meet the county’s digital expectations while keeping the existing publishing relationship and process intact.
“So we told them we’d do their county website for free,” Dunn-Rankin told them. “They wouldn’t have to spend the resources to build it or maintain it themselves.”
To make that offer realistic, Dunn-Rankin reached out to Column with a specific ask: D-R Media would remain the county’s point of contact—handling support, billing, and the relationship—but Column would power the site behind the scenes.
“Basically, I needed to white-label Column,” he 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.”
That partnership let D-R Media deliver a site that looked and functioned like an official county resource. “It looks and feels like a county website,” Dunn-Rankin said. “You would not know that it’s not a county website.”
And it aligned with the county’s IT constraints as well: instead of integrating into county systems, the site was hosted externally. “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 from the top of their site.”
The Impact
1) D-R Media kept the Polk County relationship—and the revenue
The outcome was straightforward: Polk County got the county-branded digital experience it wanted, and D-R Media kept the public notice business by partnering with Column.
2) The “spillover” effect across cities stayed limited
D-R Media expected the county site might become a default destination for surrounding municipalities, but in practice, very few opted in.
“Only one of our 17 cities has done that,” Dunn-Rankin said. “It’s business as usual” for the rest.
The reason was practical: while some cities could save some money, they would also inherit the work of managing notices themselves—and most clerks didn’t want to add a new administrative burden without additional staff.
“The clerk now has to do that work, and they don’t want to do that work,” he said.
Just as important, Dunn-Rankin credits the long-standing relationships D-R Media maintains with local governments:
“Our cities like us,” he said, “so there wasn’t much incentive to change a workflow that was already working.”
3) A repeatable playbook for publishers navigating similar change
Today, Dunn-Rankin points to Polk County as a practical model: when counties want a digital notice site, publishers can stay in control by offering a modern solution through the newspaper—rather than letting public notice move entirely in-house.
“Here’s what we did in Polk,” he said. “Go do that everywhere and lock the county up.”
Bottom Line
Florida’s changes created a new option for counties to publish notices online—introducing a real decision point for publishers and local governments.
D-R Media’s response was to:
educate county leaders on what the law actually meant operationally and financially
offer a county-branded digital experience without forcing the county to build or maintain it
partner with Column for the underlying software infrastructure
The result: Polk County got the modern, county-branded experience it wanted, and D-R Media preserved both the relationship and the public notice revenue stream.