Alaska Senate bill would take bite out of tiny-print newspaper ad revenue; publishers fight back

A bill to be heard on the Senate floor on Monday would modernize public notice regulations and eliminate the requirement that some public notices for the sale, appropriation, or removal of water will not need to be published in newspapers. They can be published online at the state’s public notice website.

For decades, budget hawks have said that the “legal notices” in newspapers are costly and unnecessary, since everything else in the world, including the Legislature itself, has migrated online. Newspapers are increasingly just another online source of information, but no longer dominate the news landscape like they did even 25 years ago. For example, the Juneau Empire now only prints two editions a week. While it once printed 9,000 copies six days a week, it’s down to 1,595 print copies on Wednesdays and 1,802 on Saturdays.

The Anchorage Daily News is down to printing five days a week. It’s protective of its print circulation numbers but during the bankruptcy proceedings of 2017, it was down to about 28,000, and likely is half that in 2024. It says to advertisers that its circulation is 57,000 daily, but that’s due to its digital edition and reach, and it does not break out the closely guarded numbers.

Senate Bill 68, recognizing that most newspapers have most of their readers online anyway, calls for publishing the notices in the Alaska Online Public Notice System, by mail, and by “other means as deemed necessary.”

There would be no cost to the state for the change, says the Division of Mining, Land and Water. In fact, there even might be substantial savings.

The executive director of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner opposes the change. Virginia Farmier wrote that many in the Fairbanks area do not have access to the internet. “The bill will do a disservice to our community and the state as a whole,” she said in her letter of opposition. “The public has relied on community newspapers to keep them informed and to publish public notices. If the state government publishes their own notices, where’s the transparency in that? I took an informal poll of people in Fairbanks asking if they knew the state had an ‘online public notices’ website and they did not.”

Ryan Binkley, publisher of the Anchorage Daily News, wrote, “The current law, which requires notices to be published in newspapers of general circulation, ensures that the public is informed and has the opportunity to provide feedback and input on matters that affect their communities. Newspapers (and their websites, which include all the notices published) have a vastly wider reach and are more accessible to Alaskans who may not have access to the internet or are not frequent users of government websites. This change would disenfranchise these individuals and limit their ability to participate in the decision-making process.”

The Alaska State Chamber of Commerce supports the bill: “For a number of years, the Chamber has had a position that supports the automation for processing of titles, liens, notary signatures, and other paper-based processes to improve access, delivery turnarounds and lower cost of operations. SB68 streamlines an antiquated process and provides for a common-sense efficiency as it relates public notice for water rights.”

The bill would update, but not substantively change, any other requirements for notice by the commissioner to determine the rights of persons holding existing appropriations, removal, or sale of beneficial water use rights, the bill sponsor says.

“Eliminating the newspaper notice requirement would prevent delays in the water permitting process and save the applicants a significant amount of money required for newspaper notice. The changes would utilize the state’s existing online public notice system, which is available to most Alaskans at no cost. All public notices posted on the online public notice system are permanently retained for future reference by interested parties, whereas newspaper notices are much more difficult to retrieve. Utilizing the online public notice system ensures that each Alaska resident has equal access to public notices rather than just newspaper subscribers or residents of an affected area. Further, elimination of coordinating newspaper publications reduces the permit processing timeframe,” the sponsor statement says.

SB 68 says that the public can use the subscriptions feature on the Alaska Online Public Notice System website (https://aws.state.ak.us/OnlinePublicNotices/) to either register for all notifications through the system, or to tailor what notifications from which departments they wish to receive.

“The Department of Natural Resources is eager to educate the public on the benefits of using the online notice system; SB 68 enables notice to be delivered to Alaskans through the power of the Internet,” the statement says.

Other states are dropping the newspaper option for public notices.

Last year, Florida Gob. Ron DeSantis signed the first law in the nation, which took effect Jan. 1, allowing local governments to post exclusively on either government websites or in free newspapers or other publications that have been cut out of the lucrative business of publishing public notices.

This year has seen more legislatures moving away from newspapers. There are bills in both Indiana and Iowa that provide government websites as an alternative to newsprint, which is a dying medium.

The newspaper industry is fighting the trend, trying to claw back the revenues that are supporting smaller and smaller publications, staffed by leftwing operatives. The Public Notice Resource Center is a website operated by American Court and Commercial Newspapers, Inc. to help newspapers stop the bleeding off of taxpayer dollars from their enterprises. PNRC even created a suite of ads  that newspapers can use to promote how interesting and essential these legal ads can be.

And PNRC advises publishers to make sure their reporting staff does not disparage legal ads.

“Pay close attention to reporting on public notice issues and you may begin to observe that some papers have adopted certain rhetorical habits that tend to undermine the goal of preserving newspaper notice. They’re mostly innocent mistakes made by people who are unaware that what they’re doing may be counterproductive. But it’s fair to say that if those habits could be eliminated it might enhance the policy environment for maintaining newspaper notice,” PNRC wrote this month.

“It would also help if reporters stopped referring to them as ‘those tiny ads in the back of the paper,’ a description we see in newspaper stories so often it practically qualifies as a cliche. They’re only tiny and in the back of the paper if your paper insists on making them that way. Try taking a different approach by presenting notices in a manner that brings attention to them — the way this publisher did and the way many other publishers try to do with other types of advertising.”

PNRC also reports that at least one newspaper has sued its state government for pulling the ads.

“A newspaper based in Delaware County, N.Y. sued county officials in December, claiming they unlawfully canceled its public notice contract in retaliation for unfavorable news coverage. The Reporter, a weekly newspaper based in the county seat of Delhi, also alleges the county violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments by ordering its employees to refer all questions from the paper to the county attorney’s office,” the website reports.

The bill will be in its third reading on the Senate floor on Monday. It’s main sponsor, Sen. Cathy Giessel, had her name removed from the bill and made the sponsor the entire Senate Natural Resources Committee. Information about the bill is at this link.