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Public Notices Going Online, Not In Newspapers
An anonymous reader tips a story up on Bnet.com about the growing trend for governments and others to eschew newspapers and post notices of public record on their own Web sites. It's under discussion at local, state, and national government levels, including in the SEC and the states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, so far. "If classified ads were a backbone of the newspaper business, then the very center of the spine was the public notice. Mandated by laws and courts, these often long recitations of detail were to give official notification, to any who were interested, of the legal intents and actions of both government entities and companies that found themselves under some appropriate regulation. But a growing number of state and local governments want to move public notices online to their own sites as a cost-cutting measure. Beyond newspaper economics, critics are concerned that the shift would allow government officials to effectively hide their activities from scrutiny."
Who reads newspapers?
Old People
What group is most likely to bother to read some long boring public notice and have enough free time and spare outrage to make any noise about it?
Old People
Where do you put things you don't want Old People to find?
The Internet
Local government websites are some of the most poorly designed and hardest to navigate.
I second you on that!
Take for instance the home page for Tuttle, Oklahoma: http://mirror.centos.org/mirrorscripts/noindex_new.html
That single page is so bloody cluttered and difficult to navigate that the Oklahoma City Manager (who is an very important pesron!) had difficulty with it. See http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=127