Last year, the Connecticut General Assembly considered An Act Concerning Posting Legal Notices on the Web Site of a Municipality. The goal of this legislation was “to relieve municipalities of costly mandates by authorizing the posting of legal notices on municipal web sites.” The bill made it though the Government Administration and Elections Committee and the Planning and Development Committee but didn’t get any further.

This year, it is back as part of An Act Reducing Costs to Municipalities with a goal of implementing the Governor's budget recommendations. This time, it seems to be getting even more attention. CT Mirror quotes Jim Leahy, executive director of Connecticut Daily Newspapers Association, who claims that “There’s no question some newspapers would go out of business” if they lost the income from these legal notices.

Paul Bass commented on the article saying

Print papers have had a scam going for decades: way overcharge for legal notices that nobody reads.
Politicians allowed them to do it because they didn't want to anger corporate monopoly publishers. They wanted good press.

Now the corporate owners that fleeced the public (including cash-strapped governments and low-income people filing legal notices at exorbitant rates) want the public's sympathy. They want a bail-out. And ill-gotten money to keep their dying business models afloat a little longer.

George Gombossy, who has also made the transition from print to digital writes in his article, Newspaper Bailouts: The Truth Comes Out, Ct Newspapers Need Paid Public Notices To Survive:

If Leahy wants a bailout for newspapers he should ask for it instead of leading a massive PR effort to fool taxpayers and the General Assembly into thinking that requiring the spending of millions of dollars a year in public notices in newspapers somehow protects democracy any more than posting the notices on the Internet.

Yet we need to wonder if George and Paul have additional unspoken concerns. Other online news publishers have commented to me about how they wish they could get a little bit of the public notice gravy train. Currently, it is reserved just for print newspapers.

We also have to wonder about the motives of some of the sponsors of the bill. In 2009, some of the same people advocating allowing municipalities to post notices on their websites instead of in local newspapers also supported An Act Concerning Posting of Information on Municipal Websites. The goal of the legislation was to “delay the implementation of the mandate on municipalities to post information on web sites.” It seems like they only want to post stuff on municipal websites if they absolutely have to.

Likewise, some of these same people have opposed making public funds available to candidates running for state office that the candidates can use to inform the public about the issues and their stances on the issues. Perhaps they just don’t want people to know what is going on in the state.

Given the upheaval in the news and the electoral processes, we need to continue to seek new ways to make more government information more accessible in less costly are more efficient ways. Perhaps instead of simply doing away with the requirement that municipalities publish notices in local papers, we should allow them to publish them on online sites as well, providing the online sites get sufficient traffic. Municipalities that have vibrant websites might be able to use their own websites. Municipalities with lackluster websites that do not attract traffic might find it more efficient to post their notices on some of the online news sites that are rapidly growing in the state.

Then there is the question of who will cover local news if this important subsidy is taken away from local news organizations. Perhaps the proposed change in requirements should only apply in those communities that have a basic level of coverage of boards and commission meetings and other town events. Towns could help meet this requirement by making sure that many of their board and commission meetings are broadcast on government access television as well as encouraging local bloggers and citizen journalists to cover town meetings.

The way news is covered in our towns and cities is rapidly changing. We need to find ways to make sure that with these changes we don’t end up with less information being available to residents and voters. At the same time, with a little Yankee ingenuity, we can perhaps promote competition, better coverage and even save municipalities important tax dollars.