Did you know some local governments in drought-ridden areas “seed” their clouds to increase precipitation? Many in Northern New Mexico were mystified on Nov. 4, 2021, when they read a public notice in the Taos News about an application filed with a state water commission for such a “weather control and precipitation enhancement” project that was to set to begin the following month.

News coverage of the notice and the local controversy it spawned earned the Taos News and veteran editor and reporter Rick Romancito first-place in this year’s Michael Kramer Public Notice Journalism Award competition. Sam Galski of the Standard-Speaker in Hazleton, Pa., won second-place. Two North Dakota papers — The Bismarck Tribune and 2020 public notice award winner The (Crosby) Journal — tied for third.

The competition was hosted by the National Newspaper Association Foundation and sponsored by PNRC.

Romancito (pictured above) signaled the importance of the cloud-seeding notice by mentioning it in the first sentence of the web version of the story he wrote about the notice the week after it was originally published. He reported the notice was “sparking interest through the Northern New Mexico region” due to its broad impact and unusual subject matter, as well as the relatively brief comment period it granted citizens to raise objections.

In addition to being a fine example of public notice journalism, Romancito’s initial story was a model of thorough reporting that described the cloud-seeding process and the history behind its use and development. It also explained to readers how they could comment on the application.

That original report was published on page 10 of the print edition of the weekly paper. By the following week, opposition stirred up by the application — including most of the 150 people or so who participated via teleconference in a public hearing — earned front-page coverage. The application was withdrawn later that week.

Sam Galski’s second-place entry included several examples of excellent shoe-leather coverage of common municipal issues like zoning plans and infrastructure projects. Each of his stories cite a public notice as an important source for the reporting.

Galski’s package is reminiscent of the kind of entry we have grown accustomed to seeing from the Scranton Time-Tribune’s Jim Lockwood, who has won public notice reporting awards from both PNRC and the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association on many previous occasions. Both Lockwood and Galski work for Times-Shamrock Communications, a Pennsylvania-based regional news chain that should be commended for its commitment to public notice and for highlighting its use as source material in their news stories.

The stories from North Dakota that tied for third-place both focus on a similar subject: How public officials sometimes fail to satisy the state’s already-lax meeting notice requirements.

Neither the statewide COVID vaccination planning committee in Bismarck nor the city council in Crosby were required to publish a newspaper notice of the meetings that Bilal Suleiman of the Bismarck Tribune and Brad Nygaard of the Crosby Journal, respectively, claim were insufficiently noticed. All the agencies needed to do was file their meeting schedules with the secretary of state and/or post a meeting notice on their own websites, but they couldn’t even meet that low bar.

The annual public notice reporting award is named in honor of public notice advocate Michael Kramer (pictured at right), a former PNRC Board member and president of Law Bulletin Media in Chicago, who died on Dec. 7, 2020, after a battle with cancer. Kramer spent his life in the news-publishing business and joined the Law Bulletin in 1997, rising to publisher in 2007 and company president in 2015. He was also a valued member of the Illinois Press Foundation Board of Directors for many years.