Ready for battle? 10 steps to defeat attacks on public notices in your state

The public notice franchise has become one of the most stable and important areas of newspaper revenues. However, every year state legislatures around the country initiate bills to remove the legal requirements. There is no need to wait until a bill is launched, here are 10 pro-active things your paper can do now to protect the franchise.

1. Sell the value proposition of a trusted 3rd party source for government information. 

People are less trustful of government than ever. The legal requirement is one way of guaranteeing that citizens can access government reporting without alteration. If anything, the government should be required to publish more vetted government data - not less - even if it is used only for specific purposes. 

2. Make sure your notices are online as well as in print. This is a major theme of Richard Karpel’s, director of the Public Notice Resource Center, the only association dedicated to public notice research. He advises newspapers to digitize public notices to deflate any argument that other online sites are more searchable and that newspapers have failed to modernize. 

3. Make it easy to buy. Purchasing online notices with the variety of requirements for frequency, dates, font sizes and so on, is notoriously difficult for newspapers, private parties and state organizations. It does not have to be this way. iPublish has an automated front end that pre-calculates all the requirements into a write once, publish in a click document that goes both in print and online. Again, this takes away one of the underlying arguments - that having to post in print and digital is too difficult. 

4. Promote them, don’t bury them. “Don’t just stick them in the back of your newspaper and forget about them,”  Karpel advised in an interview with E&P.

 “The easiest way to innovate in this area is through design. There are so many newspapers that run notices in a manner that makes readers think, ‘Did they want to hide this intentionally?’ Then, there are very few others that I feel are doing a great job.”

5. Find the real cost in per-capita tax dollars in your state - it may be lower than anyone thinks. 

Most public notice bills aimed at dropping requirements start off as punitive towards newspapers, however, the political argument is typically a financial one. 

Understanding the actual tax dollars spent, and then spent on a per capita basis is a great number to have handy in the event of a legislative attack. Even $32 million, attributed by Chris Christi, in his now infamous attack on public notice revenues, winds up being a savings of just about $4 per person per year when you divide by the 8.8 million people who live in New Jersey. Additionally, only a fraction is paid by cities, most is paid by private individuals.  

According to an article in Poynter, an attack bill in Indiana was defeated in part by using this math.  Stephen Key, executive director of the Hoosier State Press Association, pointed out that savings per Indiana adult were just  50 cents per year.

 “I’ve never heard any average Hoosier say that’s an outrageous waste of their tax dollars,” he said. The initiative failed. 

6. Gather data on the online and print audiences.  Public notice audiences are not huge, but they are, in fact, much larger than audiences for an online-only site with no SEO track record or the backing of a media company. 

When the Colorado State Press association needed to counter a legislative bill attacking public notice requirements, one publisher in south Denver was able to say that public notices in his paper were ‘bestsellers’. This initiative, too,  ultimately failed to pass.  

7. Use Personal relationships with state legislators and the governor to convey importance, urgency and value propositions. The governor is particularly important since they have historically vetoed anti-newspaper  bills passed by a more partisan legislature. 

8. Don’t be afraid to use the power of the press. When the Florida state legislature proposed taking public notices out of local newspapers, The Tampa Bay Times wrote a February 2020 editorial. In it, they contended that smaller newspapers “are often the sole independent source about what local government is up to in their communities” and would be disproportionately affected. Florida requirements remained in place. 

9. Participate in national lobbying efforts. A recent letter from newsgroups to Congress, for example, endorsed Steven Waldman’s proposal that governments place as much as $1 billion more ads such as military recruitment ads, census information, and health alerts in newspapers, building on the 100-year-old tradition of required public notices. 

10. Sign up for the Public Notice Resource Center’s news alerts. “We’re the only national organization focused on public notices…and follows all 50 states and analyzes the bills,” said Karpel. This group can keep you up-to-date on initiatives around the country as well as successful strategies used by others.