Editor’s note: Transparency, ever a concern with those striving for good government, is now undergoing a test in the state Legislature, which is considering changing the law on the publication of legal notices. Brett Ainsworth, publisher of The Retrospect weekly newspaper and president of the New Jersey Press Association, offers perspective on and an answer to the question at issue.
Governmental transparency could take another serious blow by year’s end as the state Legislature contemplates undoing how the public receives legal notices. Instead of finding legal notices in newspapers like this one, legislators may enact a system where New Jerseyans would need to monitor more than 1,000 – maybe as many as 2,000 – different websites.
The legal notice problem precipitates from a state statute at least 80 years old that was last amended in 1983. The statute sets the rules about which news media are eligible to carry legal notices, how the legal notices are to be set in type and how much to charge for publication of the notices. For context, that long predates the internet age and, per U.S. Census data, was adopted before half of the state’s residents were born.
Newspapers publish legal notices that govern a wide variety of civic and legal issues – as an example, notices of the pending seizure and sale of private property by the county sheriff’s department. That’s an important and unfortunately necessary business in which government benefits from a transparent process. Peruse the legal notice pages and you will note all sorts of important public business that citizens rightfully deserve to be able to monitor easily.
In place of an easily accessible, central source, the idea that legislation could scatter legal notices to the websites of 563 municipalities, more than 600 school districts, 21 counties, plus numerous state, county and local agencies, may seem alarmist or the revelation of a nefarious scheme. The reality is the Legislature is grappling with the changing news media landscape.
Clearly, New Jersey needs a 21st century process that maximizes trust and transparency. What has not changed, however, is that notification via an independent press, where the public naturally looks for news and information about government, engenders trust that government is transparent in its actions.
Over a year ago, in my capacity as the president of the New Jersey Press Association, I convened a committee to develop a legislative proposal to modernize legal notices. The NJPA plan, which is in the hands of state leadership now, aims to maximize the exposure of legal notices to the public while also modernizing which New Jersey news publications are eligible to carry them. This includes emerging media that may never have been in print.
All publishers of legal notices would be required to upload those notices to a central, third-party website, such as the NJPA’s two-decade-old njpublicnotices.com, which is freely searchable to the public.
A key component for any legal notice publisher, like this one, is the ability to continue to charge for the service we provide as an independent and trusted third party. The NJPA committee worked to ensure the online price structure would result in pricing consistent with the 1983 print price structure. That way current legal notice advertisers would see the same expense.
We worked in good faith to propose a transition that is fair to independents newspapers while looking to include online news media. The fees for the services provided is a tiny fraction of government budgets, typically measurable in tenths of a percent or less, and represents an extremely economical deal for trust and transparency.
I suggest that publishing legal notifications works as a complement to good governance and publishers, like any other business, deservedly charge a fair fee for that service.
There is an ongoing crisis for news-gathering organizations, especially print, but I see a path to a healthy, sustainable news ecosystem. To achieve that we need our elected leaders to join with citizens and independent media to move toward that emerging, sustainable world.
Add your voice to that call by contacting Assembly Majority Leader Louis Greenwald, who has a track record of working to improve New Jersey’s information environment, at 856-435-1247, or send an email to AsmGreenwald@njleg.org and ask him to support the NJPA plan.
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A longer version of this article first appeared on The Retrospect’s website.
