Pay close attention to reporting on public notice issues and you may begin to observe that some papers have adopted certain rhetorical habits that tend to undermine the goal of preserving newspaper notice. They’re mostly innocent mistakes made by people who are unaware that what they’re doing may be counterproductive. But it’s fair to say that if those habits could be eliminated it might enhance the policy environment for maintaining newspaper notice.

“Reading public notice ads in the classified section of a newspaper is about exciting as watching paint dry,” claimed the Pittsburgh area’s Indiana Gazette in an editorial it published last year in favor of newspaper notice. The fact that the paper’s editorial board qualified the statement (“ … but it’s necessary reading for some and a legal requirement for local, state and government entities in Pennsylvania and across the nation”) hardly softened the blow.

Whenever we see claims about how boring public notices are — they’re made pretty frequently, often by people who work in the newspaper business — it reminds us of the pharmacy owner in Iowa who told PNRC that the notices are the first thing he reads in his local paper. Believe it or not, some people actually like to read the notices in your paper! In fact, PNRC even created a suite of ads designed to promote how interesting and essential they can be.

It would also help if reporters stopped referring to them as “those tiny ads in the back of the paper,” a description we see in newspaper stories so often it practically qualifies as a cliche. They’re only tiny and in the back of the paper if your paper insists on making them that way. Try taking a different approach by presenting notices in a manner that brings attention to them — the way this publisher did and the way many other publishers try to do with other types of advertising.

But even if you don’t do those things, your paper still shouldn’t characterize its notices as boring and hard to find. Your elected representatives may come to believe you.