Tag: Virginia

Virginia will allow public notices to be published in digital-only news outlets

Public notices may not be the sexiest part of the local news business, but the revenue they bring in is crucial. Also known as legal ads, these notices — usually placed by local government to announce public hearings, bids and other business — must, in most states, be published in a print newspaper. But this requirement has come under question in recent years as more and more communities find themselves without a viable print paper. Why not let them advertise in a digital news outlet?

Recently Virginia became the first state to allow that option. ARLnow, a digital site that covers the Arlington, Virginia, area, reports that the state legislature recently approved a digital-only option by “overwhelming bipartisan majorities,” and that Gov. Glenn Younkin has signed it into law. The new system will go into effect on July 1.

The proposal, put together by the Virginia Press Association and a group of online publishers, requires that a digital outlet meet certain benchmarks in terms of readership and local staffing. According to a statement by Betsy Edwards, executive director of the press association:

The Virginia Press Association believes that independent, third-party local news sites (print or online) are the best place to publish government public notices. We supported this legislation because it utilizes local newspapers and news websites to provide the public with maximum transparency.

The Virginia law is just the latest sign that the monopoly held by print newspapers over public notices is beginning to break apart. Last year Oregon passed a law allowing public notices in replica editions with paid subscribers, and Indiana is on the verge of adopting a system that would ease, but not overturn, the print requirement.

In Massachusetts, there has been talk of changing the system, but proposals to allow digital-only publication are in the very early stages. It’s not an easy issue. Some independent print newspaper owners argue that public notice revenue is vital to their bottom line, and that it would be unfair to allow digital-only outlets to get that money.

On the other hand, there are some absurd situations out there. Bedford officials, for instance, advertise in The Sun of Lowell, a chain-owned paper with virtually no presence in the town, even though the community is covered by The Bedford Citizen, a digital nonprofit with a significant footprint.

What really matters is that government be required to advertise in independent outlets — unlike Florida, for instance, where one of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ anti-press actions was to push legislation allowing officials to post public notices on their own official websites.

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Why some in the media are holding back on a motive in the Club Q shootings

Pride parade in Colorado Springs. Photo (cc) 2013 by Stephen Rees.

You may have noticed some reluctance on the part of the media to label the mass killings in Colorado Springs as a hate crime aimed at the LGBTQ community. Looking at the case from the outside, the shooter certainly appears to have been motivated by anti-LGBTQ animus. He burst into Club Q, an LGBTQ club, and started firing before he was taken down by a military veteran. The Colorado Sun, quoting an anonymous police source, reported as early as Sunday that “law enforcement has collected evidence suggesting the shooting was a hate crime.”

Despite all that, many commentators are holding back. For instance, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, even while decrying the right’s exploitation of anti-transgender and anti-drag show sentiment, felt compelled to write: “Perhaps we’ll learn something in the coming days that will put these murders, which took place on the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance, into a new light, but right now, it seems hard to separate them from a nationwide campaign of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. incitement.”

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Why the caution? I suspect some of it stems from the aftermath of the mass killings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016. That horrifying incident claimed 49 lives. Like Club Q, the Pulse catered to the LGBTQ community, and the shootings were immediately labeled a crime motivated by hatred of LGBTQ people. And so we all believed it was — until evidence to the contrary emerged. As Jane Coaston explained in Vox in 2018, the shooter had originally intended to attack a shopping and entertainment complex but decided security was too tight. His wife told investigators that he chose the Pulse at random. Coaston wrote:

This evidence dramatically changes the mass shooting’s narrative; politicians and individuals across the political spectrum had positioned it as an anti-LGBTQ hate crime. Instead, the new evidence suggests, the Pulse nightclub shooting was intended as revenge for US anti-terror policies abroad.

The evidence emerged during the trial of the shooter’s wife, Noor Salman, whom the federal government charged with aiding and abetting and obstruction of justice. Federal prosecutors argued that Salman had helped her husband plan and orchestrate the attack.

What we later learned about the Pulse shootings is a good reminder that journalism needs to be grounded in evidence. As Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel put it in their classic book “The Elements of Journalism,” our work should be grounded in “a discipline of verification.” We all know what the Colorado Springs incident looks like, but until we know for sure, cautionary language such as Goldberg’s is the proper way to frame this.

Of course, there’s an additional challenge: Before can can arrive at an understanding of what happened, we’re already on to the next mass shooting. Colorado Springs came right after the killings of three University of Virginia football players. Then, on Tuesday night, a gunman killed six people at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia.

So no, we shouldn’t get ahead of the story. But what we can do at moments like this is call out politicians who try to turn us against each other because of race or sexual orientation, and whose only answer to the spread of gun-related violence is more guns. Those are universal values regardless of the details of any particular incident.