The current recession has had truly chilling effects on the newspaper business, as revenue from commercial advertising drops to record low levels. Now there is increasing pressure on public notice income.

A mainstay of newspaper revenue since before the time of Benjamin Franklin, public notices are those columns of fine-print that appear in the inside or back pages of papers, containing notices of everything from public meetings to changes in the law. Most states require that such notices be carried in a public forum, and that has historically meant newspapers.

That, however, was before the World Wide Web. The Web is a very public place,  similar to the public announcement boards which often graced town squares centuries ago. This similarity has been noticed by state and local government, always eager in a recession to cut costs. The laws which govern public notices are being altered in some locations to allow the posting of notices on Web pages operated by government agencies.

There are important differences between newspapers and Web pages, though, and it is those differences that are being debated when public-notice laws come up for change. Some of these differences are subtle. Once printed, a newspaper cannot be changed; the Web is much more ephemeral, lending itself to easy revision and thus to confusion. In addition, not all citizens have computers, and the price of entry to the Internet may be impossible for some people to overcome.

The arguments on both sides are neatly summarized in an AP article out of North Carolina. The example given is a small town which has begun placing public notices on its Web site instead of in the local newspaper. By doing so, they will save $13,000 over the coming year. Mayor Keith Weatherly of Apex, NC says, “This was good for us for this year, that we didn’t have to include that advertising cost in our budget.”

Of course, the $13,000 that the town of Apex saved was $13,000 of lost revenue for the local newspaper. That public notice revenue loss just adds to the losses already taken in commercial advertising revenue, already responsible for the demise of a number of daily newspapers in America. Times are tough for the venerable but much-maligned newspaper industry, and this current trend is not helping. Although a number of state and local governments have been unable to wrest the advertising away from newspapers, more and more are trying and succeeding. That noise you hear may be another small nail being driven into the coffin of the newspaper.

Related:

Entry was posted on Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 at 2:19 pm under Advertising, Internet, Legal.

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
Stumble It!