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."

Comments

Re:Which method would get the most dissemination?

[Dayze!Confused]

There was a problem when I was growing up with the "local" newspaper and public notices. They had to hit a certain number of subscribers in order to count as having put out a public notice, so they gave away their newspaper to the people that lived furthest away, others closer to town paid about $0.35. It was comprised of about 70% public notices. The whole purpose of the paper was for companies to have a small paper that no one reads that meets the requirements for public notice so they can build on protected lands and other such things.