Sydney Henderson is a 100-year-old widow living in a small condo at Hacienda Carmel, a senior living community in Monterey County, California. If it wasn’t for a public notice published in a newspaper, she probably would have lost her home and been booted out on the street by a bank. Her story is a textbook example of why public notice advertising still belongs in newspapers and not on obscure government websites.

Wells Fargo held the reverse mortgage Henderson secured on her condo in 1998. According to Mary Duan’s recent column in Monterey County Weekly, Henderson mistakenly believed she had enrolled in a government program that automatically rolled the property taxes into her regular mortgage payments. So she owed $24,000 in back taxes when the bank began foreclosure proceedings.