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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."
Today when you register a corporation you are required to post this fact in one or more newspapers or other similar publications. Often these notices are rather expensive to post as they are not simply standard classified ads.
Similarly, there are requirements for stock offerings and such. As well as government contract opportunities.
Sure, nobody reads newspapers anymore but at least they are saved in the public library for just about all time. You want to find something? There is a place to look. And, for the most part, this historical record is a trustworthy one.
Who, exactly, is archiving government web site content like this? Nobody, that's who. We are hell-bent on destroying any possibility of records for the future, and I have no idea why we are so firmly set on this as a goal. Easier? Sure it is. More relevent? Maybe. But there is no way that most of the digital information today is being archived in a meaningful manner, and what there is that is being archived has a very, very low signal to noise ratio, or perhaps more accurately for the Internet, a rather high noise to signal ratio.
Certainly the US is so firmly focused on entertainment today that newspapers and meaningful news doesn't stand a chance. It isn't entertaining and attempts to make news entertaining are usually grotesque paradies of reality.
This shouldn't be allowed. Public notices in newspapers serve two purposes. The first is the one mentioned, publishing the notice where interested parties can see it. The second isn't mentioned, though, and that's to create a record of the notice outside the control of the party required to post it. The notice can't be changed later, can't be quietly made to never have happened. We've already seen entities change stories posted on their Web sites when what was in those stories became inconvenient later. Yes, it's going to cost a little extra to maintain that independent record of the notices. When we make a big payment or an important one where not making it has big consequences, it definitely costs for them to give us a receipt that we can use later to prove we did pay and what we paid for. We don't accept the cost savings as a valid reason for not being given a receipt, we don't accept "Trust us, we've got a record of your payment.".