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.
Disastrous decision to limit print surveys undermines Census
The federal government is finding it more difficult than usual to get people to complete the 2020 Census. The headline on Politico Magazine’s recent article about the once-every-decade constitutional exercise — “A Brush with Catastrophe: Inside the 2020 Census Meltdown” — suggests the scale of the problem.
The meltdown is due, in part, to the pandemic and the Trump Administration’s aggressive maneuvers to obstruct the count. But another significant driver has been the Census Bureau’s incomprehensible decision to force most Americans to respond to the survey via the internet.
Digital news’ public notice role overstated in Poynter article
In a kind of follow-up to a previous story he reported 10 years ago on government subsidies for newspapers, former newspaper editor David Westphal took a close look earlier this month for the Poynter Institute at the state of public notice.
Although we’re never happy when public notice is framed as a government subsidy, as opposed to payment for service rendered, we concede reasonable people may disagree on that point. We also know from working with him as a source on the story that Westphal takes his responsibility to report the issue fairly and accurately quite seriously. Few journalists have covered public notice with more insight and intelligence than Westphal brings to this story.
County Learns to Rely on its Newspaper, Not a Government Website, For Public Notice
The proof that public notices published in newspapers are more effective than those that are posted on government websites doesn’t get any more direct and conclusive than this.
Last year, the jail in Ford County, Ill. needed a new generator. The sheriff put a bid-solicitation notice on the county website. It isn’t clear whether the notice got a response, but the sheriff later asked the county’s Public Building Commission to approve a $72,576 bid for a generator. The Commission initially approved the expenditure but rescinded the approval when it learned the sheriff hadn’t published a notice in a local newspaper, as state law requires.
U.S. Senator: “Paper is not antiquated. It’s reliable.”
As policymakers have long understood, one of the key elements of a valid public notice is archivability. Notices must be capable of being permanently stored in their original, unaltered form to serve as historical records for the judicial system, scholars and historians. Newspapers do a good job at that. Websites do not.
Late last year, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., introduced a bill that reminds us of the important role historical records still play in sustaining our democracy. Sen. Lankford’s Secure Elections Act, which is designed to harden U.S. defenses against interference in federal elections, was co-sponsored by senators from both parties spanning the ideological spectrum; it appears to have widespread support within the upper chamber.
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.
PNRC Criticizes FCC Commissioners for Smug Dismissiveness
In comments filed last month with the Federal Communication Commission, the Public Notice Resource Center criticized Commissioners who mocked opposition to a recent proposal that would eliminate FCC rules requiring broadcasters to publish a notice in a local newspaper when they file certain license applications with the Commission.
“We were struck by the dismissive tone adopted in the statements of (some of the Commissioners) respecting the notion that local newspapers might still serve as the most effective means to deliver notice to the public,” said PNRC in its comments. “How did we reach a point where their consideration of the issue of public notice is so facile they ridicule a longstanding practice without bothering to provide any evidence that the alternative they’re promoting would be an improvement?”
Budget Notices on Government Website Leave Indiana Citizens in the Dark
In 2014, then-Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed a law passed by the Indiana legislature that eliminated newspaper notice of local government budgets. Before the law was enacted, all local government units in Indiana — from cities and counties to libraries and conservation districts — were required to publish their annual budget proposals and estimated tax rates in a local newspaper.
Now they are only required to post them on the website of the state’s Department of Local Government Finance (DLGF), which was one of the main proponents of the new law.
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?