The status of newspaper notice in New Jersey was thrown into uncertainty when Advance Publications announced on Oct. 30 that early next year it plans to close a production facility and the print editions of several significant newspapers in the state, including the state’s largest paper, the Star-Ledger.

Although it isn’t clear how many local government units were using the three daily papers and one weekly newspaper that will cease publication in the wake of Advance’s announcement, the scale of the closure’s impact began to come into focus when rural Warren County filed a lawsuit seeking a new outlet for its notices. Warren County has been publishing its notices in the Star-Ledger even though the paper is based in Newark, which is located two counties and 63 miles from the county seat.

Warren County’s lawsuit seeks a court order making the Star-Ledger website, NJ.com, its new official publication. According to Advance, media analytics measurement company Comscore ranks NJ.com “as the #1 local news site in the country.”

The county is seeking relief even though Gannett’s Daily Record is its alternate official paper and qualifies under the state’s public notice statute to publish its notices. The county argues the Daily Record is ill-equipped to serve as its official newspaper because “its circulation is limited to 1,345 subscribers” and it reports on “only a minute slice of eastern Warren County.”

Associations representing local governments in New Jersey renewed their calls to move official notice in the Garden State to their members’ websites. “Time is of the essence for state leaders to address New Jersey’s looming public notice crisis,” said the New Jersey League of Municipalities, the New Jersey Association of Counties, and the New Jersey School Boards Association in a statement reported by the New Jersey Globe. The Globe also reported the government groups are “urging the legislature to take immediate action” by passing a law permitting notices to be published on local government websites or “in a database created and maintained by the State of New Jersey.” According to the Globe, the government associations’ “third option” would be to publish notices on “a website or digital publication.”

Legislative members of both parties have indicated changes will need to be made, according to the New Jersey Monitor. “I am committed to finding ways of modernizing the process of disseminating legal notices in a way that maintains the same level of transparency and accessibility,” Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin (D-Middlesex) told the nonprofit news organization.

The New Jersey Press Association (NJPA) floated the draft of a bill that would allow notices to be published on paid-newspaper websites as an alternative to their print editions. The bill would also require newspapers to publish all notices on the NJPA statewide public notice site, and it would change the way the public notice rates charged by newspapers are calculated. Advertising rates set by statute in New Jersey haven’t increased since 1983.

NJPA no longer employs staff devoted to public policy or advocacy, but its Board of Directors continues to retain firms that handle the association’s lobbying and legal work.

The New Jersey legislature is one of eight state assemblies that meet throughout the year and don’t schedule an adjournment. Legislation authorizing free-circulation newspapers in the state to publish notices, and other bills that would allow notices to be published on newspaper websites or on a statewide government website, were introduced earlier this year but haven’t received a hearing.

As we went to press, hearings on the public notice issue had not yet been scheduled in the waning days of the 2024 session.