Public-notice battles get more political, threaten existence of many small newspapers that need the 'legal ads' to survive

The long battle over public-notice advertising, a source of revenue that has become critical for small newspapers as they have lost retail ads, gets some needed national attention from the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

Writer Susan Chandler notes the latest efforts in several state legislatures to reduce public-notice requirements, including passage of a very worrisome law in Florida, and the laws in some states that leave selection of public-notice platforms up to elected officials, who can ignore basic standards while exercising political retribution.

Custer County (Wikipedia map)

She cites the examples of two Colorado counties: Pitkin, where the county commission made the Aspen Daily News the paper of record after The Aspen Times mishandled a libel suit and its fallout, and Custer, population 4,700, where commissioners moved public notices from the long-established Wet Mountain Tribune "to a nine-year-old partisan newspaper called the Sangre de Cristo Sentinel even though the Tribune submitted the low bid. . . . One of them cited the Tribune’s 'combative' coverage as the reason for the change. Losing legal notices has cost the Tribune between $10,000 and $15,000 a year in direct revenue, said Publisher Jordan Hedberg. . . . The loss is likely higher because of the halo effect of being the paper of record, he added."

Hedburg told Chandler that he may file a federal lawsuit, citing the First Amendment: “The Supreme Court has ruled that governments can’t use contracts to retaliate against protected speech, but we have a county commissioner retaliating against us for doing our job. Basically, the only way we are going to qualify is if we don’t write anything that irks this particular commissioner.”

Richard Karpel, executive director of the Public Notice Resource Center, which tracks the issue and sponsors an annual award for the best stories that come from public-notice ads, told Chandler, “We’ve seen it become more of a partisan issue in the last five or 10 years. In some states, there are Republicans who are in battle with the media as part of their political strategy.”

This is an existential issue for many newspapers, Chandler warns: "Les High, a longtime publisher in a small town in North Carolina, estimates that small community papers could lose 20 to 25 percent of their revenue if legal notices went away, compared with only a 5 percent loss for larger dailies."

“It’s the little guys who are under threat,” said High, who runs the Border Belt Independent, a nonprofit public-interest news site that covers four North Carolina counties. “They’re struggling already and they’re in counties without large revenue streams from retailers. If we lost public notices here, I bet you would see 15 to 20 percent of small newspapers disappear.”

Newspapers need to do a better job with public notices to help save them, said Dean Ridings, CEO of America's Newspapers, a trade group: “Publishers need to look for creative ways to push those out. Maybe it’s a bigger button on their website. Maybe it’s having a standing report once a month. This would be a good time to devote effort to making them easier to find digitally. We know how to do those things.” (Read more)