Sarah Bowman is one of the young environmental reporters at the Indianapolis Star who wrote the IDEM story discussed in the post below.

About a week before the IDEM article was published, Bowman wrote another story about a state agency proposal to establish a bobcat hunting season in Indiana. She was surprised when she began receiving phone calls from readers who wanted to know where and when the Natural Resources Commission (NRC) would be holding a public hearing on its proposal. After all, her story about the plan had been published that morning and it included a graphic featuring those details.

What she didn’t realize when the calls first started coming in was the graphic was inadvertently omitted from the version that had been published in the newspaper. The folks who called — about two dozen in all — read the story in the paper and wanted to attend the meeting but didn’t know when it was. 

Bowman was also surprised when she learned why those people couldn’t simply find the information on the web.

“Most said they don’t have access to the internet or don’t have a computer at home,” says Bowman, who, like many other professionals working in major metropolitan areas in the U.S., spends a lot of time each day on the internet. “It was an eye-opener for me.”

The calls she received were about a newspaper story, not a public notice. But they clearly demonstrate there are still many citizens — even in big cities like Indianapolis — who don’t have internet access and would miss notices about matters important to them if they were posted on government websites instead of newspapers.

Postscript: About a hundred people ended up attending the NRC hearing when it was held and, according to Bowman’s follow-up reporting, they “let out a collective sigh of relief and erupted into cheers” when the director of the state’s Department of Natural Resources announced the public outcry against the proposal had convinced him to withdraw it.