T he 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
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. ……… 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 magazine's 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
“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
Duncan Garrett, NBb's photographer
Mike Duffy, Tech Talk columnist.
22 NorthBaybiz
December 2025
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