One of the most important steps newspaper publishers can take to ensure newspapers continue to remain the exclusive vehicle for public notice is to expand the audience for those notices by posting them on their own website and on their state press associations’ statewide public notice website.
Just ask Nebraska Press Association Executive Director Dennis Derossett, who says that having a statewide website where members can post their notices — and supporting a law requiring them to do so — helped NPA convince lawmakers to increase the rates paid for those notices (see story below).
State press group touts multi-channel infrastructure
If the battle over public notice in state legislatures is framed as “newspapers vs the Internet,” newspapers lose.
The Louisiana Press Association (LPA) has taken that lesson to heart as it prepares for a 2022 legislative session that it’s nervous about. In an attractive two-page flyer that will serve as a leave-behind for meetings with legislators (see flyer below), LPA is taking a new messaging approach by touting its members’ digital prowess in delivering public notice advertising across multiple channels.
Historical records vanish from the internet
Earlier this year, we wrote about Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain’s “The Internet is Rotting,” an essay about how important historical records are disappearing from the web at an alarming rate. Zittrain indirectly made the case that it would be a mistake for policymakers to rely on the web as the sole publication point for statutory notice, since such notice is in part designed to serve as the official and unassailably accurate first draft of history.
Why public notice shouldn’t be published only on the web
There’s no question that public notice ads should be displayed on the internet. That’s why 15 states have passed laws requiring newspapers that publish notices in their print edition to also run them on their website and/or on their state press association’s statewide public notice site.
After all, notices are designed to be read and lots of people read stuff on the internet.
Governor Vetoes Public Notice Bill in Colorado
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper yesterday vetoed a bill that would have substantially reduced a category of newspaper notice in the state beginning in 2022.
Senate Bill 156 would have allowed counties to publish salary reports, financial statements and monthly expense reports on their own websites in lieu of newspapers. The legislation would still have required counties to publish newspaper notices providing a website address for each report.
More Proof That Even in Big Cities, Many Still Don’t Have Access to the Internet
Sarah Bowman is one of the young environmental reporters at the Indianapolis Star who wrote the IDEM story discussed in the post below.
About a week before the IDEM article was published, Bowman wrote another story about a state agency proposal to establish a bobcat hunting season in Indiana. She was surprised when she began receiving phone calls from readers who wanted to know where and when the Natural Resources Commission (NRC) would be holding a public hearing on its proposal. After all, her story about the plan had been published that morning and it included a graphic featuring those details.
CJR Piece on Public Notice Badly Misinformed
In a recent article in Columbia Journalism Review, Liena Zagare and Ben Smith argue that local governments should move public notice and other civic advertising from newspapers to local-news websites like Zagare’s BKLYNER.
To buttress their case, they claim that a newspaper in their borough, the Brooklyn Eagle, recently had “three of its 12 pages entirely covered” by advertising designed to “make sure taxpayers see how their money is being spent, and to prevent officials from hiding corrupt deals.” But those three pages of advertising in the Eagle were placed by law firms, not public officials. And its purpose was to provide official notice of courtroom process, not public spending. That’s a pretty glaring mistake. Surely, CJR would want to correct the record, right?
Researchers Rush to Preserve Data on Government Websites
For over 200 years, public notices have been published in newspapers in part as a consequence of the inviolability of newsprint. Legislators have always understood that when they passed laws requiring notice of official actions to be published in newspapers, a record of the notice would be easy to authenticate and would remain in newspaper archives in perpetuity.
A recent conference of independent researchers provides an excellent reminder that government websites fail miserably at meeting that traditional public-notice standard.
New York Bill Allows Emailing of Meeting Notices to Newspapers
Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a new law clarifying that public meeting notices required by state law may be emailed to newspapers for publication. A review of the applicable law indicates the statute formerly stated merely that notice “shall be given to the news media.” The bill signed by Gov. Cuomo adds the words “or electronically transmitted” to the statute. “This is a positive step that will save time in getting notices to the media and therefore getting them out to the public,” the president of the New York State Town Clerks Association told the Albany Times Union. The new law also requires notices of government meetings that are live streamed to the public to include the web address of the site streaming the meeting.
Print Wins One; Wall Street Journal Chalks It Up to Lobbyists
The national media tend to operate in internet-saturated media environments and often overlook the value of print to key constituencies. As a result, Consumers for Paper Options, an organization funded by the paper and mailing industries, has an uphill battle to be heard as it tries to preserve the ability of the public to read information on paper.