The Wet Mountain Tribune in December settled its slam-dunk federal lawsuit against the Custer County Board of Commissioner (BOCC) and will once again run the county’s public notices. The lawsuit claimed the BOCC violated the Tribune’s First Amendment rights by retaliating against it by awarding the county’s public notice contract to another local newspaper that is openly partisan.
In addition to making the Tribune the county’s official newspaper again for the next four years, Custer County also agreed to pay the Tribune $50,000. That’s about three times as much as the county spends annually on its notices, according to Tribune owner Jordan Hedberg’s (photo above) estimate.
Expanding public notice eligibility requirements
The newspaper industry that existed when public notice laws were originally enacted is a thing of the past. There are fewer newspapers and they have less circulation. The papers are physically smaller and sometimes they’re designed, edited and/or printed at great geographical distances from the local markets in which they circulate. They’re also published electronically with a reach and immediacy that were unprecedented in the pre-internet era.
These changes have made it increasingly difficult for newspapers and government agencies to discharge their responsibilities under public notice laws enacted many decades ago. As a result, state press associations otherwise reluctant to meddle with public notice statutes now may find it necessary to advocate for changes to ensure the laws that determine which papers qualify to publish notices remain relevant.
Newspaper notice still going strong
Here’s a USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy study from 2010, entitled “Insult to injury: The disappearance of public notices in US newspapers”.
The final paragraph of the report includes the following claim: “This brief in no way advocates for the demise of public notices, yet in an era of cost cutting and online information distribution newspapers are increasingly facing a reality of online-only public notices.”
The newspaper industry’s challenge
A recent column on the nonprofit news website the Pennsylvania Capital-Star argues that Pennsylvania voters should receive more notice about proposed amendments to the state’s Constitution advanced by Republican lawmakers this year. The column’s author, Patrick Beaty, believes the notice requirements set by the Constitution are insufficient.
We have no position on the substance of the amendments or on Beaty’s call for more transparency surrounding the amendment process.
Nevertheless, his column offers an excellent illustration of a major challenge facing the newspaper industry: To reframe the debate around public notice by helping people understand that notices published in newspapers are also published on newspaper websites.
Scope of Florida’s new public notice law questioned
As we previously reported, the new Florida public notice statute set to take affect on Jan. 1 is beset with ambiguity. In general, the statute is designed to give local governments the option to publish notices on their county website in lieu of newspapers. But as the dust has settled from the battle over House Bill 7049, fears about the immediate damage it will wreak on public notice in the state have diminished.
A survey of statewide public notice websites
Statewide public notice websites sponsored by the newspaper industry have been the focus of major change in the last few years. Many states enacted new laws requiring notices to be published on the sites and about two dozen state press groups have switched website vendors.
The vendor shift has been driven by the growing adoption of online ad-entry systems and the withdrawal from the market of the first vendor to license a web-based platform to power the websites.
How not to defend public notice
Custer County isn’t the only jurisdiction in Colorado where controversy has erupted over the publication of local notices. Greenwood Village and Pitkin County have had their own recent dust-ups over the designation of their local papers of record. The Pitkin County story is particularly instructive for the wrong reasons.
In late July, Pitkin’s Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) adopted the Aspen Daily News as its new official newspaper, displacing the Aspen Times, a daily that had served as the ski town’s paper of record since 1993. The Times had changed ownership at the beginning of the year, igniting several local controversies that apparently motivated the commissioners to make the change.
Colorado paper files slam-dunk lawsuit over lost notices
The Wet Mountain Tribune filed a federal lawsuit last month accusing the local Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) of punishing it by awarding Custer County’s public notice contract to another newspaper. The lawsuit alleges the BOCC violated the Tribune’s First Amendment rights by retaliating against it for reporting factual matters the Board would have preferred to keep hidden.
The paper appears to have a very strong case.
Public notice award winners announced
Did you know some local governments in drought-ridden areas “seed” their clouds to increase precipitation? Many in Northern New Mexico were mystified on Nov. 4, 2021, when they read a public notice in the Taos News about an application filed with a state water commission for such a “weather control and precipitation enhancement” project that was to set to begin the following month.
News coverage of the notice and the local controversy it spawned earned the Taos News and veteran editor and reporter Rick Romancito first-place in this year’s Michael Kramer Public Notice Journalism Award competition. Sam Galski of the Standard-Speaker in Hazleton, Pa., won second-place. Two North Dakota papers — The Bismarck Tribune and 2020 public notice award winner The (Crosby) Journal — tied for third.
A weird but benign session in Missouri
“I’ve been doing advocacy work in the state legislature for 40 years and this was probably the weirdest session I’ve ever experienced,” says Doug Crews, lobbyist and former executive director of the Missouri Press Association (MPA), where he worked for 36 years.
Two related factors made the 2022 session in Jefferson City unusual, according to Crews, who now contracts with Lathrop GPM Consulting, the firm that represents MPA. About half the session was dominated by Senate debate over a redistricting map for Missouri’s eight U.S. Congressional districts. And with the Senate Republican majority split into two caucuses — one ultra-conservative and the other more moderate — functionally speaking there are now three ideologically distinct parties in the state Senate.