Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.".