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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."
I think if the local paper was/is widely distributed this old method might be read more widely (people without internet access, or not visiting city/state web sites often). These can be stored in libraries and seen casually around town. But our local paper of record just closed its doors, not sure where these notices will be printed now.
If you are looking for something specific (say you want to bid on a contract which might be announced using these methods) probably an internet site where you can search is best. But for the function of a watchdog or check on govt. both can hide information, with the paper printing less likely (it has to hid in plain site in small print).
Firefox has an extension called Scrapbook that allows you to save to your cache entire copies of a webpage without saving screenshots to your hard drive. Your browser automatically downloads all pages from a website within a link depth that you set, and you can direct the process to be restricted to one domain.
I spidered www.whitehouse.gov on January 20 and January 21, 2009 to a link depth of 3. I wish I remembered to do the same thing with Blagojevich's webpages before they were changed.