Media: Required Government Newspaper Ads

Just about everybody has access to the Internet.

Yet decades old state laws require local governments to print legal announcements in local papers.

It's a windfall for the papers, especially in this era of less and less print advertising.

     But even that guaranteed income over in Georgia didn't save one paper. The Waycross Journal-Herald published for the last time this week, leaving local governments in a fix about how to follow the legal-ad law.


From another Georgia paper, The Brunswick News:

"George Barnhill, district attorney of the Waycross Judicial Circuit, said that Georgia law requires governments to buy legal ads to advise the public of everything from foreclosures to public hearings to meetings.
Clerk of Court Melba Fiveash said that she and two other constitutional officers, the probate judge and sheriff, are the ones to designate the legal organ and must meet to figure out how to find a new one.
The legal organ must be a publication with paid circulation and should be the one with the most subscribers, she said. The law also says preference must be given to publications within the state."

     The obvious answer is to change the state law and allow governments to put the legal notices online only.....if not on other media websites, then on their own government websites (for free!!!). 
     I'm confident there would be spirited bidding by TV stations and other media to get the contract.

  Fighting furiously against that change would be the lobbyists for the newspapers.      
     They're doing just that in Michigan where such a law has been introduced.
     The Alabama law was changed in 2016 to require internet posting on the newspaper's website. There was a perfect opportunity to open it up for bidding, but....guess the lobbyists for the other media were unable to convince lawmakers to take away the print monopoly, if they tried at all. 
     Irony: the broadcast stations are required to buy legal notices in the newspapers....and the FCC is considering eliminating that rule:

“...it strains credulity that TV and radio audiences would turn to a printed newspaper instead of the Internet as their first source for information about their local broadcasters,”  (FCC Chair Ajit Pai, quoted in the Public Notice Resource Center website. )