The peculiar, plucky story of Investor’s Business Daily.

Still, by 2004, IBD claimed to have turned a profit for the first time. The company is privately held, and a spokeswoman declined to discuss its financial performance. But the paper's finances, in many ways, are beside the point. IBD is less of a newspaper than a marketing device for myriad seminars, books, and conferences run by William O'Neil. As newspapers hemorrhage readers to the Web, and advertisers follow them there, IBD offers a glimpse of what a newspaper business model of the future might look like. Say what you will about its journalism, but IBD has successfully monetized its audience into paying for high-margin services.

This month, I attended an IBD seminar titled "Intermediate Strategies for Successful Investing." The conference room at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square was packed with about 100 IBD subscribers who shelled out the $1,195 fee to participate in the all-day session. They were true believers and soaked up the investment lessons with rapt attention for nine hours. IBD runs 40 such seminars during the year at varying levels of sophistication and expense. Level I seminars cost $99; Level III sessions run $2,995; and for $9,995, attendees can spend a weekend getting investment tips from Bill O'Neil himself. IBD generates approximately $10 million in annual revenue from its seminar business.

Politically, IBD's opinion page veers to the outer reaches of the right, making even the Journal's trademark business-friendly editorial line seem moderate. IBD flatly denies that climate change is real and is caused by human activity. "They can speculate that's the case. But they can't prove it," one editorial trilled on July 28. Another editorial suggested global warming is a good thing. "Carbon dioxide is in fact not a pollutant. Rather, it is the basis of all plant, and therefore all animal, life on Earth." The page refers to Barack Obama as a "socialist" and claims that he thinks America is a "feudal society."

Still, newspapers, hoping to survive in a post-print age, could learn something from IBD by converting their readers into multiple sources of revenue. IBD offers a potential model for how newspapers can carve out a media niche and charge significant sums of money for content. As newspapers shed advertising and circulation revenue and morph from physical print products into online communities of like-minded readers, the audience, and their willingness to pay to be members of the community, is the path to profitability.