On a December day in 2019, Alyssa Meier (pictured at left) was at work at The Leader-News in Washburn, N.D. when she received an email from a local bank announcing its intention to publish a public notice, but its subject had to be kept confidential.

Meier had seen plenty of public notices in her newspaper career, but never a secret one.

“We have a pretty good relationship with the bank, and they sent me a kind of bizarre email about a confidential legal, so I set up a phone call with the bank president right away,” Meier said in a telephone interview.