NorthBay biz first published as Sonoma Business in 1976.
The North Bay was a different place 50 years ago. Sonoma, Marin and Napa counties were emerging from their SF-bedroom-community identities to establish themselves as powerful regional centers of commerce. Business was conducted out of brick-and-mortar offices and storefronts. Commutes were smooth. If you needed to make an immediate phone call away from your desk you’d use something called a payphone.
Such now-obsolete modes of media and communication like fax machines, compact discs and pagers weren’t even in general use yet. But the times were changing.
Enter: Sonoma Business.
Launched with its first edition in January 1976 by founders John Brill, William Byron and David Bolling, the then-quarterly magazine set out to cover the county business scene through in-depth features and people profiles of such movers and shakers as Hugh Codding, Henry Trione and other civic leaders driving the burgeoning business community. At the time, the area had several regional publications based or available in the North Bay—daily papers the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and Marin Independent Journal, plus the Pacific Sun alt weekly, among other community weeklies—but nothing focused on the business community.
“It seemed like there was an inexhaustible supply of interesting people, businesses and issues to cover,” Bolling has said about the climate in which Sonoma Business was launched. After 50 years and counting, it appears he was spot on.
In its debut issue, the magazine promised to be “no-nonsense, dollars and facts-oriented, and at the same time, highly readable.”
In the early days, stories ranged from a 10,000-word essay on the “ups and downs of banking deregulation” to the latest tech fads of the day (“Computers: The Future Is Here!”).
One prescient piece from 1982 warned against the addicting allure of video games, highlighting how some towns are adopting ordinances banning minors from play. “Is this, then, the end of American civilization as we know it?” the story asked about Donkey Kong.
The magazine published four times a year and design could be best-described as minimalist—largely in black and white, with few photos and occasional rudimentary single-color pages highlighting select ads.
Longtime magazine photographer Duncan Garrett recalls joining Sonoma Business’s stable of freelance photographers in the mid-1980s when the inside pages were entirely black and white, with only the cover being in color. “I guess the expense of color printing was exorbitant!” muses Garrett. He says regular color photography didn’t become the norm until the 2000s.
Garrett says much of the content was “advertorial” back then, but on the occasions it wasn’t he would “push the envelope” with his visuals. “But I have always been focused on making the subject feel comfortable and not made fun of or seen in a negative way,” stresses Garrett.
In 1984, the publishing partners sold Sonoma Business (and the Santa Rosa News Herald newspaper, which they also owned) to Lesher Communications Inc., a regional newspaper company whose flagship publication at the time was the Contra Costa Times. LCI had been on a newspaper buying spree in the 1980s, but Sonoma Business was its sole glossy magazine. The company soon learned magazine production was a different business model to newspapers and, with its bottom-line suffering across several publications, sold Sonoma Business in 1992 to then-editor Jim Dunn. By that point the magazine had evolved from its early incarnation as a quarterly to publishing monthly, including a best-of-Sonoma readers’ poll started in 1989 to recognize community-favorites in such categories as “most honest mechanic,” “friendliest business owner,” “funniest barber” and “golf hole.”
Over the course of the next eight years, Dunn helmed the ship, estimating he’d edited more than 7,000 pages between starting as an unpaid intern in 1987 through his time as editor and publisher. “Managing a monthly magazine and a small business is superb training,” he observed at the time.
New owners
In August of 2000, Dunn decided to step away from the magazine world to try his hand at authoring books and screenplays, selling Sonoma Business to a trio of Illinois-to-California transplants—Norman and Joni Rosinski, and Joni’s brother John Dennis. The Rosinskis and Dennis were publishing veterans from Chicago, having been in management positions at a group of twice-weekly newspapers and a daily under the umbrella of Vancouver-based media giant Hollinger, Inc. Wanting to step away from the cold corporate world (and the cold Windy City weather), the Rosinskis and Dennis had been looking for an opportunity to purchase a publication in the Golden State, and a business magazine in the heart of California wine country was too good to pass up, recalls Norm.
“Initially, we rented a home in Bodega Bay eager to begin to enjoy California’s warm and sunny weather. It didn’t take us long to realize Bodega Bay wasn’t that place,” Norm told NBb recently. “Almost immediately, we moved to Santa Rosa. Our official California education had begun.”
With Norm as editor and publisher, Joni as vice president for advertising and John Dennis taking the reigns as VP of operations, the new owners had ambitious plans for Sonoma Business—from adding new regular columnists and feature writers to expanding the magazines reach beyond the county confines. Soon new regular features began appearing—a financial column, a “bulletin board” page announcing new hires, a Tech Talk feature highlighting the latest technological innovations, plus a Vine Wise column focused on wine industry trends.
Michael Duffy was among the magazine’s new voices at the time, launching the Tech Talk column that he still writes monthly to this day. “I’ve written roughly 400 columns,” estimates Duffy. “I’ve missed a lot of deadlines but, to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never missed having a column in the magazine.”
Duffy says the pressure to write something “coherent” every month has pushed him to become a better writer, though it remains a struggle to be informative, useful and entertaining—three goals he sets out for himself each month. After 25 years of Tech Talk, Duffy believes he’s written about 400,000 words for the magazine. “It’s truly hard to believe,” he says.
Another big step in 2001 was the launch of the magazine’s website, where online readers would find an archive of back issues, as well as some web-only features. The now-defunct site, sonomabusiness.com, was built by tech columnist Duffy, who had become something of an unpaid IT consultant for the company. “They would ask me out to lunch whenever they had a technology question,” he laughs.
The early 2000s enjoyed a rocketing economy, thanks in no small part to the Bay Area tech boom—it eventually proved to be a bubble, but that’s another story—and after more than 25 years focused solely on its namesake county, Sonoma Business was ready to expand. The November 2002 issue included Norman Rosinski’s announcement that they were now publishing throughout the North Bay’s tri-county area as the newly branded NorthBay biz magazine, under three names—Sonoma NorthBay biz, Marin NorthBay biz and Napa NorthBay biz, each circulating in their respective regions with the same content under different titles. He stressed the growing reality that the North Bay is one “vibrant trading area… mandated the need for the magazine to expand its footprint.”
“It’s generally recognized that the county geographic borders are distinct and cultural differences are wonderfully diverse,” said Rosinski at the time. “However, they’re almost non-existent when it comes time to conduct business—then the three counties become one North Bay market.”
By June the following year, the need to localize the name of the magazine to three different areas was deemed unnecessary (and probably somewhat confusing) and the brand solidified across the region as NorthBay biz.
Those early years under the new brand found Norm, Joni and John working seven days a week, guiding a small staff and livening up the design with four-color printing and glossy cover stock. Over time, the magazine became the go-to source for local business trends and regional economic analysis from the edges of the San Pablo Bay to the beaches of the Pacific.
As with many community publications, the editorial staff remained lean, but passionate. Editors in those years included such talented local journalists as Laura Hagar Rush, Julie Fadda Powers, Alexandra Russell and Karen Hart.
Petaluma native Russell joined NBb in 2006 following her move back to the county after cutting her teeth at Bay Area Music (BAM) magazine in the 1990s. She says joining the team at NBb gave her a “new perspective” on her home county. “I was able to see SoCo as a well-rounded, thriving and supportive community—not as a podunk hometown I couldn’t wait to leave [as a youth],” she says. “There were people and industries I had never considered—from health care to technology to nonprofits and entertainment.”
Russell says her stories covering the intricacies of the wine industry were particularly memorable. “Its complex web of [legal] requirements and restrictions was fascinating,” says Russell, who continues to byline our Great Tastes winery features each month. Working at hyper-local publications like NBb have made her “a faster and better editor, and a more succinct writer,” she says.
“But mostly it’s the people I met, both colleagues and subjects,” she adds. ”The C-suite players and the on-the-ground workers each had a story to tell. Finding those stories—and telling them with clarity and empathy—was the best part of the job.”
Adds Russell: “Well, that and the NBb Best Of parties.”
A multimedia company
After 17 years running the magazine, the Rosinskis decided the time was right to step away from red-ink-stained page proofs, ever-tightening deadlines and an endless parade of business mixers to attend. In 2017, they sold NorthBay biz to Amaturo Sonoma Media Group (ASMG), the Santa Rosa-based broadcasting company operating such county radio favorites as News/Talk KSRO, Froggy 92.9 FM, KHits 104.9 FM, Hot 101.7 FM and 97.7 FM The River. (ASMG has since added KZST 100.1 FM and other popular local stations to its stable.) Looking to expand its avid “listenership” to include a longtime “readership,” NorthBay biz was ASMG’s foray into print and online business news, as well as a chance to extend the company’s footprint into Napa and Marin, says Lawrence Amaturo, ASMG managing partner.
The Rosinksis, meanwhile, returned to Chicago to be closer to their two daughters and five grandchildren, while John Dennis stayed on as president of the magazine, before retiring in 2021.
Amaturo describes taking on the role as magazine publisher nearly a decade ago as a way of showing his company was in a growth mode. Publishing “was a business moving in all directions” Amaturo recalls about purchasing NorthBay biz—and indeed it was. Traditional news media was rapidly adopting digital products, with content being created for both online and print audiences. Being a newly anointed magazine publisher at the time “was like trying to build the plane, while flying the plane, while reading the owner’s manual at the same time,” says Amaturo.
Even after all these years, publishing in many ways “is still new to me,” he reflects. But, Amaturo adds, owning NorthBay biz has cemented his respect for “the power of the printed word, and the deeper understanding” of issues it can provide.
Still going strong
Today, NorthBay biz’s team is still lean, but every bit as passionate as it was under previous regimes. Anne Schenk has been with the magazine since 2003, starting as a member of the graphics team before rising to become our current design director. Anne led a celebrated redesign of the magazine in 2023—updating NBb with a fresh, contemporary look—and has been the talent behind the magazine’s many dazzling covers since 2022. Associate Editor Rosie Padilla joined in 2023 and her responsibilities are almost too numerous to mention—from bylining features, inside stories and the popular Beyond the Boardroom business-leader profiles to creating marketing collateral, managing northbaybiz.com, event planning and acting as editorial lead on our epic Best of the North Bay issue. Meanwhile sales superstar Lori Rooney has been the face of the magazine since 2009—engaging with the community at business mixers, industry events and as an irrepressible dancing diva several nights a week on the local live-music circuit. Lifelong North Bay resident Jason Walsh sharpened his journalism chops with reporter and editor stints at the Marin IJ, Pacific Sun, Santa Rosa Press Democrat—and now serves as editor in chief of NorthBay biz.
With the recent sale of the Press Democrat to a corporation based in New York, and most other locally circulating media being owned by companies outside the Bay Area, NorthBay biz stands as not only the longest-running news publication with local ownership in the region, but the only locally owned publication covering the entire North Bay, period.
Amaturo believes time will tell “if local ownership is meaningful or necessary to the community.” But ever since moving from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to what he once thought of us “small town” Sonoma County in 1996, owning local media has been meaningful to him.
“I met my wife, raised my family and walked our kids to school here,” he says. “It’s been a blessing to be in media in this county.”
For more of the in-depth, locally owned North Bay coverage we’ve been striving to produce for 50 years, visit northbaybiz.com.
