Public Notice Is a Newspaper Subsidy

Across most of the country, a government that wants to raise a rate, rezone a parcel or foreclose on a property must first publish notice of it in a newspaper. The requirement is old, statutory, and quietly load-bearing for an industry in decline.

These provisions sit in ordinary administrative law, often in a general government code, and they specify things like how many consecutive weeks a notice must run and what counts as a newspaper of general circulation.

The definitional clause is the interesting part. A publication qualifies only if it meets tests written decades ago: paid circulation, a printing schedule, a period of continuous publication. Those tests describe a mid-century newspaper, and they exclude almost everything that has replaced one.

A statute that defines a newspaper by its printing schedule has decided, without debating it, which organisations may be paid to carry the public's business.

The money is not trivial and it is unusually dependable. It arrives regardless of readership, it is mandated rather than solicited, and it does not fluctuate with an advertising market. For a small title it can be the difference between publishing and not.

This produces an awkward position for everyone. Publishers defending the requirement are defending a subsidy while arguing the public interest. Legislators proposing to move notices onto government websites are proposing a cut to local news while arguing efficiency. Both are right about the other.

The public interest argument for print has not disappeared, and it is stronger than its opponents allow. A notice on a government's own site is published by the party the notice is meant to constrain, which can amend or remove it, and which controls whether anyone can find it.

A notice published by an independent party creates a record the government does not control. That is a real property, and it is the actual justification for the arrangement.

But it is a justification for independence, not for paper. The federal government solved the same problem differently, with a daily register of official notices that is complete, dated, searchable and permanently archived, and that answers the findability objection print never did.

Which suggests the reform: keep the requirement that notice be published somewhere the publishing government does not control, drop the requirement that the somewhere be printed, and set qualification tests that a digital publication can actually meet.

That would end a subsidy that many small papers depend on, and it would be honest about ending it. The current arrangement supports local journalism through a mechanism nobody would design for the purpose and nobody will defend in those terms.

If the public wants local reporting, the argument for funding it should be made directly, in public, and lost or won on its merits. Running it through a printing requirement means it is never argued at all, and it will end anyway, one statutory amendment at a time.