Since Colonial times, state and local governments have been required to publish legal advertisements in newspapers about official proclamations, court citations, vital records, and the like. Also known as public notices, these agate-size ads inform the community of important public business — and provide the press with a crucial revenue stream.
Now, though, that system is under threat in Massachusetts. Two bills would allow legal ads to be published on government websites without any mandate that they be placed with news organizations.
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I don’t know about Massachusetts, but in New York the argument that publishing legal notices in newspapers enhances the watchdog function of the press doesn’t wash. Years ago, when I served on the board of the New York Press Association and the issue came up for debate, a Long Island publisher said he might go out of business if he lost the designation of an official newspaper where legals had to be published. Keeping that designation, he confessed, kept him from publishing anything too critical of the local officials who decided who got the official designation.
I only have an issue with the notices not being accessible online in some communities. Paywalled or not, why shouldn’t a newspaper post paid legal notices on their websites? My local paper does in a round-about way. You have to click on the “print edition” and flip through the PDF pages. The drawback (or benefit, depending on one’s point of view) to that approach is that it may not be as search engine friendly.
I also live in a community where a larger percentage of the population may not have the cash to subscribe to a paper, and many never receive notices about public hearings.
And another problem – it’s not easy to copy/paste text to translate a legal notice from a PDF. I think they need to be available in the dominant language of a given community.