When we last reported on New Jersey, the state faced a public notice crisis triggered by the news that the Newhouse media empire’s Star-Ledger, the state’s largest and most significant newspaper, planned to shutter its print edition on Feb. 1, along with a sister publication and several affiliated newspapers. The state legislature temporarily suspended the crisis on the final day of 2024, when it enacted AB-5151, giving itself two months to amend the Garden State’s public notice laws and come up with a solution.

AB-5151 stipulated that existing official newspapers would continue to serve as the state’s heralds of public notice, and that notices could be published in those newspapers’ print editions or posted on their websites until March 1, 2025.

Several proposals to amend the state’s public notice laws have been introduced since then and a few others carried over from the 2024 session. The latest proposal, introduced late last week, is an extraordinary bill that was previously supported by the New Jersey Press Association (NJPA). It diverges in several key respects from standard practices that have been adopted in other states.

NJPA President Audrey Harvin wrote to the association’s members on Jan. 21 to “strongly encourage” them “to reach out to your local legislators to support our bill. The bill # is S4064.”

An NJPA representative now tells us the version of S-4064 that was ultimately introduced “contains significant differences” from the association’s position and that it is no longer accurate to say the group supports the bill. Nevertheless, S-4064 contains provisions originally included in a proposal submitted last year by NJPA, and the group continues to support those elements of the bill.

S-4064 is a complicated piece of legislation establishing separate requirements for four different types of publications that would qualify to publish notice. Three of those categories apply to legacy newspapers — i.e., print publications currently designated as official newspapers that have paid circulation and possess a periodical permit from the U.S. Postal Service.

The fourth category is reserved for online-only news publications that publish paid online content for at least two years before they can qualify to publish notices. It’s not clear how many news websites in the state currently meet the qualifying criteria mandated in the bill but if there are any they would first be eligible to begin publishing notices two years after the bill is signed into law.

All four categories of publications are required to maintain a physical address in the state “where activities are conducted that meaningfully contribute to the publication.” They’re also required to post notices on NJPA’s statewide public notice website and provide a home page link to the site.

Extraordinary provisions

Three elements of S-4064 distinguish it from anything PNRC has ever seen in a bill originally proposed by a state press association.

1. Notices posted online on qualifying publication websites are required to be published behind a paywall. That means notices published in front of a paywall wouldn’t be legally valid. Public notice statutes in every other state that include mandates to publish notices on newspaper websites require them to be published in front of a paywall and free-of-charge to the public.

2. While the statute requires news organizations that operate a news website to post notices behind a paywall, it lets them decide whether to also publish the notices in print. No other public notice statute in the U.S. provides official newspapers with the option not to publish their notices in print, which — as the newspaper industry has argued for decades — is a far better vehicle for reaching the public than the internet.

3. State and local government units are authorized to publish notices on their own websites if they are “unable to identify a qualified newspaper.” This provision wasn’t included in the original proposal drafted by NJPA and a representative of the association tells us the group opposes its inclusion in the bill. NJPA’s representative says the issue of what to do when there isn’t an official newspaper available in a particular municipality is extremely complicated and the association hasn’t developed a consensus about what to do when it occurs.

Fees

S-4064 also increases fees for text-only notices and for the first time establishes rates for tabular or preprint notices. Fees for text-only notices increase in steps up a ladder of ranges set by “bona fide net paid subscribers.” Advertising rates under New Jersey’s current public notice statute, which haven’t changed since 1983, are based on net paid circulation, ranging from 25 cents per line to $1 per line. Fees for tabular or prebuilt notices, which aren’t set in current law, escalate from $3.50 per square inch to $4.30 per square inch in S-4064.

To establish the rates they can charge, qualifying publications under S-4064 are required to file an annual “affidavit setting forth the average number of bona fide net paid subscribers of the newspaper or online news publication for the previous 12-month period.”

NJPA supports increasing fees, which haven’t changed since Ronald Reagan’s first term as president. (Prices are now more than three times higher than they were then.) A representative of the association says the group is in favor of raising fees but doesn’t fully subscribe to the rate structure in S-4064, which substantially deviates from NJPA’s original proposal. The per-character rates in the legislation are 10 times higher than the proposal submitted by NJPA, which apparently resulted from a misplaced decimal in the bill-writing process.

NJPA’s proposal and the final bill also calculate “bona fide net paid subscribers” differently. S-4064 bases the calculation on “subscribers of the newspaper or online publication” while NJPA’s version fixes it on “the cumulative total of unduplicated print and online subscribers of any newspaper or online news publication.”

Other bills

S-4064 is sponsored by Senators Andrew Zwicker and Angela McKnight, Democrats who were both first elected to the legislature in 2016. The Democratic Party dominates politics in Trenton, holding the governorship and large majorities in both the Senate and General Assembly.

Several other bills have been introduced that would also revise the state’s public notice laws. Three of those bills — including two introduced after the Star-Ledger’s announcement precipitated the present crisis — require the Department of Community Affairs (DCA) to establish and maintain a statewide public notice website and allow local government units to publish notices on the site as an alternative to newspaper notice.

One of the proposals that would move notices to the DCA website, S-3905, was introduced in December. It is sponsored by Senators Kristin Corrado, a Republican, and James Beach, a Democrat who was Assistant Majority Leader for 11 years before being named the Deputy Majority Whip in the present session.

Another proposal introduced in December, A-5156, authorizes government notices to be posted on a local government website when there is no qualified print-edition newspaper available to publish them in a particular municipality. It is sponsored by Assemblyman Roy Freiman, a Democrat who has been Deputy Majority Leader in the General Assembly since 2022.

With 22 days left before the A-5151 status quo expires none of these bills have yet to be scheduled for a hearing.