Legislation designed to move all official notice to a single state-agency website has been introduced this year in Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, New Jersey and West Virginia. The bills in Indiana, Georgia and West Virginia are already dead (see story above) and those in Idaho and New Jersey appear unlikely to pass.

But these types of bills probably pose the most serious long-term threat facing newspaper notice. They are fully subsidized by taxpayers and force newspapers to compete with the most well-resourced organization in every state: The executive branch of the state government.

By contrast, public notice laws that allow local governments to post notices on their own websites have proven not to be an existential threat. Local government website bills represent bad public policy, but we’ve learned from experience in states like Florida, Kentucky and Ohio, that many local governments will continue to publish their notices in newspapers even when they’re allowed to post them on their own websites.

It comes down to fair competition and a level playing field.

Well-operated newspapers that are deeply embedded in their communities and provide extensive reach through a strong combination of print and digital platforms can compete with local governments. Local officials may prefer to pay a newspaper to publish notices even though they have the option to post them at no extra cost on a government website, for any combination of different reasons:

• The local government doesn’t have a website or it has a bad one that is rarely updated.
• The employees who place the notices are already stretched thin and it saves them time and aggravation to continue having their local paper publish them.
• Local officials actually care about providing notice and know that few residents use the government website. They want people to know what their local government is doing and understand the best way to inform them is through the local paper.
• They like their local newspaper or they simply like having a paper in town, the same way small communities may like having their own local pharmacy, coffee shop or hardware store.
• They simply prefer to stick with the status quo.
• Nobody told them about the new law.

Some of those factors may not come into play when local newspapers are forced to compete with the state government. When a state decides to build its own public notice website, many members of the state legislature and executive branch employees make a significant investment in time and money to build the site so they have a strong incentive to make it work. And most state officials have little personal connection with the communities in the state they don’t live in, so the people who will suffer as a result of their decision to publish notices on a statewide website are, generally speaking, an undifferentiated, faceless mass.

So when legislators in your state come up with the bright idea of having the state government build a public notice website, your press group’s statewide public notice site must provide a robust alternative. We are seeing in real time the important role those websites play in opposing state-agency websites in Indiana, Idaho, Georgia and West Virginia.

To provide a robust alternative every newspaper in the state must post notices on their press association’s website. Moreover, the sites must be widely used and state officials need to know they already provide free access to all notices in a digital format so state-agency website proposals are quickly dismissed as financial folly.

The good news is the newspaper business already has a way to build awareness about press association public notice sites: Their own collective marketing power.

That’s why we thought it would be helpful to feature the Georgia Press Association’s recent ad (pictured above upper left) promoting its statewide website for which it is asking its members to devote advertising space. This isn’t the first time a state press association has created and distributed such an ad and three years ago PNRC created a suite of similar ads for state press groups to use. But GPA’s is the most recent example and a good one at that.

We also recommend state press groups consider advocating for the kind of web-posting legislation already approved in 20 states, along with something like the unique mandate in the Oklahoma Press Association-backed bill we wrote about last month. If that bill passes, newspapers in Oklahoma will be required to publish ads in every issue of their print edition promoting the availability of notices on their own print and digital platforms and on OPA’s statewide site.

The newspaper business and political environment in every state are unique and the internal challenges state press associations face vary widely. But each state and every newspaper will soon face the challenges we see today in places like Indiana, Idaho, New Jersey and West Virginia, and the sooner they prepare for those challenges the better.