How To Keep Public Notices in the Newspaper -- and Why

By: By Tonda F. Rush Newspapers have taken it in the chops recently. The roundhouse blows haven't come the Internet, but from well-intended judges and legislators, who are believing too many newspaper deathbed stories and doing too little to protect the public's right to know.

Two questionable court actions involve newspaper public notices. One comes in gratuitous dicta from the Maine Supreme Court setting aside a default judgment against a Colby College student sued for damages from a fistfight. The court said a newspaper notice to the defendant was insufficient. (It was. The attorneys should have also found the guy and served him in person.) Then it went on to suggest people do not read newspapers any longer.

The other is from the Connecticut Supreme Court, which is about to open a Web site for foreclosure notices, to be run there instead of in a newspaper.

Add in a spate of state legislative bills dressed up as money savers by
driving public notices to government Web sites. Suddenly, the citizenry is awash in public notice attacks. The New Mexico House of Representatives, for example, just passed HB 237 that takes a thorough school accountability notice out of the newspapers and makes citizens issue a special request at the school district office to get a copy.

The bad news about newspapers is infecting conversations all over the
country, from cocktail parties to courtrooms. How will we get along without newspapers, people are asking? (See Governing Magazine's January 2009 issue on the Disappearing Press Corps). The public notice debate logically follows.

I've been involved in newspaper public notice for more than 25 years. In 2002, I assisted a group of concerned publishers that included the American Court and Commercial Newspapers, Inc., and shortly thereafter, the National Newspaper Association, in developing the Public Notice Resource Center (PNRC).

PRNC tracks trends in public notice, provides materials to explain notice and speaks out to the nation about its value. One of its chief missions is to help our own industry understand that public notice isn't dead or dying. But we could kill it ourselves, by doing the wrong things.

If we're going to remain the choice medium for public notice, we need to take notice ourselves. Here are five things newspapers need to know on the subject and five things they need to do to keep public notice alive.

Five Things to Know

1. The Internet cannot yet replace printed notices. It is vulnerable to manipulation, loss of content and technological change. It cannot easily provide a reliable, enduring record. Even though Internet experts say there are ways to ensure today's electronic notices can be read tomorrow, no one can predict the cost or likelihood that the information will be properly maintained and carried into future applications. The printed notice has what the archivists call "fixity."

2. Publishers like to point out that not everyone is on the
Internet. That's not our best argument, but it's true. The Pew Internet and American Life Project has concluded that some people just aren't going to use the Internet. Whether they can't afford it, are technophobes, can't get broadband access, or simply don't like the idea, at least 20% will never read a public notice online.

3. Government Web sites are not free. The argument over whether
municipalities can save money by posting their own notices on their own websites is specious. Of course web postings -- whether on a government site or on a newspaper site -- create a lower incremental cost than running a printing press. The price of print will always look more costly over the short run. But the government sites do have a cost, in development, in maintenance and, above all, in obscurity. Before going down that path, ask for a report of the viewers of government site that excludes all of the .gov users and the
famous indexers, like Google and Yahoo. There won't be many.

4. Even if those sites were free, it's a question of getting what
you pay for. They don't accomplish the same things as a newspaper notice. They are not independent of the political forces that run them. They are not easily archivable. They are not easily verifiable. They are often not accessible. They typically aren't kept up to date very well. Go to your local official Web site and make a screen print of the broken and outdated data. Put in new ink cartridges first.

5. It really is about transparency. Newspapers fight hard for
public records. But in an era of smaller newsroom budgets, some information needs to be pushed out by governments, not pulled out by enterprise reporting. That's what public notices do. They give readers their own decisions whether to read or not. If they don't, the sin is in the reader. If they do, it's because newspapers have several centuries of history in building readerships. No one can say that about any website, government or private.

Five Things To Do

1. We have to get over ourselves. We cannot simply lecture from the
editorial pages. Besides the fact that politicians don't fear the editorial
pages as they once did, that's not how laws are made. Publishers have to talk to lawmakers about public notice. Yes, we get paid for them. The bridge contractor gets paid to build bridges. There is no difference.

2. This may be a surprise to some, but weekly newspapers are
newspapers. They aren't dying. Neither are the hundreds of niche and
neighborhood newspapers, any of which may be the expected place to find public notices. Now that some dailies are leaning toward less frequency, maybe we can overcome a certain elitism about community papers. I was once at an industry meeting where an editor said, "There are only two newspapers in North Dakota." There are 90 newspaper members of North Dakota Newspaper Association.

3. Public Notice isn't our last entitlement. It isn't an entitlement at all. I've witnessed newspapers large and small jacking up rates beyond tolerance, as other revenue streams falter. That was the genesis of the issue in Connecticut. We need to treat the public notice advertisers like any other valued customer.

4. Read them. PNRC looks for great examples of things that happened because of newspaper public notices. The examples are out there, but pitiably few are reported in our own newspapers. Yet great stories lurk. Ask Adrienne Packer of the Las Vegas Review-Journal how she unearthed a developer's attempt to turn cemetery-only zoned land into a lucrative commercial site.

5. Be the paper of record. The really good public notice papers
know the laws, when notices must be run and how they must appear. They help the public bodies meet their obligations. They make notices noticeable, so people can find them and promote their value.

When all of this is mastered, we need one more public spirited step. Post the notices about public business on the newspaper Web site. For free. And upload them to a state press association aggregation site where people who want to use their browsers to find them can do so. It is all about transparency, and that is our real entitlement.