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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).
Sounds like a remarkably ineffective way to hide anything. Google "public notice"+site:.gov . Should be rather simple to set up publicnotices.org (or .com) if you are worried that such notice will be "hidden".
Publishing in the Pierce County Herald, on the other hand...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
The concern here seems reasonable. Local government websites are some of the most poorly designed and hardest to navigate. I could easily see this resulting in problems not out out of malice but out of simple incompetence. Presumably regulations and guidelines should be drafted for how governments should do this. The most obvious thing is that there must be actual incoming links not hidden by either nofollow tags or anything in the robots.txt file to prevent search engine indexing. Also, there needs to be guaranteed backups and permanent searchable archives (which will in some ways make this more transparent than tiny, non-searchable notices in local newspapers). There are probably other simple rules that would be needed but those are the ones that come to mind most immediately.
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.
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
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.".
When the broadband internet is treated like a utility and everyone, including deep rural dwellers has relatively easy access to it then government can take post their 'public' notices online.
As it stands right now a good percentage of the population still do not have reasonable access to the internet or are not tech savvy enough to own a computer (i.e. many of the elderly). They should not be punished for their lack of internet access by removing public government notices from newspapers which are still easily accessible by anyone.
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This is a good thing, but it has to be done right. Like the SEC's EDGAR system.
EDGAR now has a user-friendly interface and a search engine, but underneath is a huge collection of raw SGML files accessible via FTP. These files stay up forever and their names and contents do not change. Many big services (Bloomberg, EDGAR Online, Google, etc.) grind through that data every day. One of my systems, Downside, does it too. There's no charge for access, bulk downloads are supported, and the raw filings are accessible. That's the way it should work.
What you don't want is something you can only access through a search engine, with some of the information on a pay site. A bad example is Delaware's corporate record system.
So the minimum standards for a public records system that replaces publication should be comparable to those maintained by EDGAR.