Here’s a USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy study from 2010, entitled “Insult to injury: The disappearance of public notices in US newspapers”.

The final paragraph of the report includes the following claim: “This brief in no way advocates for the demise of public notices, yet in an era of cost cutting and online information distribution newspapers are increasingly facing a reality of online-only public notices.”

Twelve years later only a single state in the U.S. even allows online-only public notice. The great majority of notices published in newspapers are now also published online, of course, but the laws in every state aside from Florida still require notices to be published first in printed newspapers. And even in Florida it has become increasingly clear that newspapers will remain most counties’ preferred choice for the delivery of notice for the foreseeable future.

We’re not here to chide USC Annenberg, which was far from alone in getting it wrong. Since the turn of the century, many observers have underestimated the enduring public policy value of newspaper notice and predicted its demise.

We will undoubtably see many proposals to move public notice to government websites in next year’s legislative sessions. But newspapers and their websites still provide the best value to state and local governments — and the publics they serve — and that fact is likely to continue to win the day in state capitols.