Detailed news coverage of the criteria required for newspapers to qualify to publish notices is rare. But last month we found two stories focused largely on that issue. Together they illustrate the policy implications of the choices legislators make when they enact public notice eligibility requirements.

The first story comes from southeast Georgia, where The Brunswick News reported on the closing of the Waycross Journal-Herald, a 105-year-old daily newspaper that published its last issue on Monday, Sept. 30. Stories about newspapers closing are not uncommon these days. But focusing, as The News did, on the challenge facing public officials in neighboring counties who need to find an alternative “legal organ” is unusual.

“(It) was not fun for me to learn on a Friday afternoon” that the Journal-Herald would close, Ware County Clerk of Courts Melba Fiveash told The News. Fiveash wasn’t happy in part because she is one of the local officials charged by law with selecting an official newspaper to replace the Journal-Herald. She also noted the urgency of the matter by detailing some of notices the county is regularly required to publish, including condemnations, name changes, guardianships and tax sales.

The city also has an urgent need for a new legal organ, Waycross’s attorney told The News. “At least every two weeks, we have ads in the paper,” said the lawyer, Rick Currie. “I don’t know how you’re going to get around that,” he said. Memo to Currie: You’re not.

According to The News, Ware County and the city of Waycross may not be the only jurisdictions with a problem on their hands. “The Journal-Herald has been the primary daily paper for Brantley and other neighboring counties, especially in face of pullbacks by the Florida Times-Union and Atlanta Journal-Constitution,” it reported.

Georgia’s general public notice statute doesn’t provide public officials with a lot of leeway when they’re called on to select an official newspaper; its mandates are unusually detailed. The statute includes content limits (“not greater than 75 percent advertising”), publication restrictions (“shall be published within the county and continuously at least weekly for a period of two years”), and minimum paid-circulation requirements that increase with population (e.g., “500 copies per issue in counties having a population of less than 20,000”). If no paper meets those qualifications, the statute requires the courts clerk, sheriff and probate judge to select the paper with the most circulation within the county. The statute also sets advertising rates, so public officials are forbidden from shopping for an official newspaper on the basis of price.

Things are done differently in California and the Mountain View Voice isn’t happy about it. The free-circulation weekly paper ran an article last month criticizing local officials for publishing the city’s notices in the San Jose Post Record, a daily newspaper that claims a total paid circulation of 77 subscribers, only 20 of whom reside in Mountain View, which has a population of more than 80,000 residents.

Unlike Georgia, California’s general public notice statute doesn’t specify minimum circulation. Although the law requires newspapers to have “substantial distribution to paid subscribers” to qualify to publish notices in a particular jurisdiction, it’s up to a judge to determine what “substantial” means. Moreover, the California public notice statute doesn’t set advertising rates, so local officials are free to select an official newspaper based solely on price.

In fact, in Mountain View they’re required by city charter to award the contract “to the lowest responsible bidder,” Councilwoman Margaret Abe-Koga told the Voice. For the past 24 years, that has been the Post Record, which has left the Voice and some local activists raising questions about the paper’s effectiveness as a vehicle of notice.

“There was zero chance for the residents to know about” a proposed development at a local apartment complex because the notices about it were published in the Post Record, a local housing activist told the Voice. “It just seems problematic to me from the outset to be using an obscure newspaper for this job.”

But Mountain View isn’t the only city in the Silicon Valley that publishes notices in the Post Record. Far from it. According to the Voice, its analysis of the paper’s recent ad history shows that only “about one out of seven government ads in the paper were placed by Mountain View.”

The PNRC website has a page with links to the general public notice statute in every state. We also maintain a spreadsheet comparing the statutes by their eligibility criteria.