Scranton reporter wins another Public Notice Journalism Award, for getting news from the 'legal ads'; he offers tips

By the Public Notice Resource Center

It was bound to happen again.

Jim Lockwood (left), a reporter for the Times-Tribune in Scranton, Pa., is the 2023 winner of PNRC’s Michael Kramer Public Notice Journalism Award, given annually to the best reporting that uses public notice as a primary source of information.

The award was announced Monday as part of the National Newspaper Association Foundation’s 2023 Better Newspaper Editorial Contest. Lockwood won the prize in 2015 and came in second or tied for second every year after that except 2022.

Lockwood’s entries in the contest generally distinguish themselves by focusing on a full body of work instead of a single story. His latest entry was 14 articles based in whole or in part on a notice. None were earth-shattering, but eight were important enough to land on the front page, including those that reported on:

• Expansion of a local VFW post
• Economic development plan to improve downtown gateways
• Scranton’s first solar farm
• First Wawa store in Lackawanna County
• Police department seeking outside accreditation
• City hiring lobbyists to lobby for federal funds

His entry also used a notice published in 1911 to explain how the city acquired a park it was planning to lease to a local nonprofit organization. The entry was further distinguished by the importance it assigned to the notices, which were invariably cited as source material early in his stories — more often than not in the second or third paragraph.

How does he do it? “Jim checks the public notices every day without fail and often finds news within them,” Times-Tribune Metro Editor Jessica Matthews said in the cover letter with Lockwood’s entry. “Jim’s longstanding practice is to read public notices, clip and mark them up, save them for future reference or pass relevant ones along to his colleagues for their beats.”

Second place this year went to Elisabeth Waldon of the Daily News in Greenville, Mich., for her reporting on a series of tardy or otherwise insufficient notices published by a local township. Brad Nygaard of The Journal in Crosby, N.D., took third place for his story about how the city inspected homes that were considered a public nuisance without providing proper notice. Nygaard won the PNRC award in 2020 and tied for second last year.

Public notice reporting tips

Lockwood says public-notice journalism is an art, but he promises that with practice, any reporter can become an expert in ferreting out important news from public-notice advertising and keep readers in the know.

Lockwood’s three Rs of public-notice journalism:

• Read them. They are right under your nose, in your own newspaper, and there is really no excuse not to read them.
• Report on them. You will see something in public notices that will spark your curiosity. When that happens, dig a little deeper and report on what you find.
• Reference them. Don’t be afraid to attribute information in your article to the public notice you are reporting on. Just treat it like any other source and write, “according to a public notice published in this newspaper.” This type of attribution adds transparency to your reporting and helps readers understand the importance of publishing notices in newspapers.

Be an early bird: Lockwood advises daily newspaper reporters to read their paper’s public notices first thing in the morning. Sometimes they announce meetings, hearings and other events and initiatives taking place that same day. “Don’t wait until 5 p.m. or you might miss something important,” he said. Weekly newspaper reporters shouldn’t dally either.

Penetrate the legalese: Often lawyers write public notices using legal terms, and they are hard for readers to comprehend. “The more you read them, the better you’ll get at understanding them,” Lockwood says. “You’ll learn the patterns and you will be able to get to the point quicker.” Sometimes the “nut graph” that tells you what the notice is really about will be the third line from the bottom. “They always bury the lede.”

Exercise your curiosity: Sometimes getting good public notice stories comes from old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting. Lockwood recalls seeing a notice advertising a hearing on condemned and abandoned property, which consisted of two boats and a trailer. It listed the date and time for the sale at the county courthouse and nothing else. His curiosity piqued, he dug a little deeper and discovered the notice was a poorly worded announcement that someone had a tax lien and had been required to liquidate their boat and trailer. “This is an example of bare-bones info in some notices, giving no hint of why or who ran this,” he says. While this public notice did not result in a story, Lockwood found it worth digging into.

Where to look for public notices. If your paper is not the newspaper of record in your town, or if other newspapers in your city or county run notices, then turn to them. Often public notices are required to be posted at the courthouse or town hall. Another resource is the statewide public-notice website operated by your state newspaper association, which you can access from this page.

“When you read public notices, ask yourself ‘what is going on here? What is the real story?’” Lockwood says. “Keep pulling away layers, like an onion, and keep those layers stored away for reference.”