Luv those Legal Notices

The love affair that newspapers have with public notices is symptomatic of the sclerosis afflicting them.

On the one hand, newspaper executives crow about their digital mastery and strategy.

On the other hand, they fight tooth and nail against the abolition of public notices in print – a prime advertising source.

State law requires that public notices, such as bids and requests for proposals issued by municipalities, be published in a newspaper.

In print. On paper. Newsprint, technically. Manufactured from trees.  

Not on the Internet, even though it’s 2013.

Even though other industries have adapted to the digital world.

Think how much money municipalities could save if they were legally permitted to publish legal notices on their web sites instead of paying thousands of dollars to have them published in the local newspaper.  

Here again is an example of the perverse personality disorder of newspaper companies in general.

In the news department, reporters are encouraged to expose waste and fraud 

in local government. 

To protect the public interest. Which includes how taxes are spent and where they are spent.  

They are encouraged to post continuous news electronically.

Down the corridor, the advertising geniuses huddle with the bean counters and the top newspaper execs plotting against any legislation that would demolish those lucrative dollars.

How would you feel if someone told you that you could only shop at one grocery store or buy certain foods?

Don’t you get the feeling newspapers are acting like a cartel, telling municipalities – meaning you the taxpayers – they have to advertise on their platform.

It’s almost un-American.

What happened to competition – which invariably leads to lower prices, at least in the short run  – and a little free enterprise?

Every year, a municipality introduces a bill that would permit localities to publish their legal notices on their taxpayer funded Web sites.

And every year, the Virginia Press Association, the industry’s lobbying group, opposes the bills and gets them killed.

Three bills have been filed to repeal the law – HB 1373, HB1378 and HB 1426 – for the 2013 General Assembly session.

Instead of re-tooling their imagination, re-inventing or re-shaping the model, newspaper companies cling to antiquated practices dictated by advertising amoebas.

Now the bills address legal notices published by municipalities.

Soon, very soon, someone might suggest that foreclosure notices, adoptions and divorces should be published on the Internet instead in a newspaper.

But that’s another column.