Circulation is irrelevant. The law is the law when it comes to legal ads.
What’s more, newspapers can do it better than anyone else.
Strip away the legal language and that’s the arguments put forth by the Star Ledger and the Daily Record in responding to a suit by Warren County that seeks to end how governments have published legal ads seemingly forever.
Just for the record, we are talking about official government notices – meeting agendas, budgets, sheriff sales – and the like. For decades, town councils, school boards and other governing bodies have published these notices in local newspapers that are so designated to receive them. Cost is determined by a formula that takes into account a paper’s circulation and how much space the ad takes up.
But now traditional newspaper circulation is dropping – and dropping.
Well aware of that, Joe Bell, the counsel for the Warren County Commissioners, filed suit last year seeking permission for the county to stop placing its legal ads in a printed newspaper.
The county had a very logical reason.
The Star Ledger is stopping its printed edition next month and the Morristown Daily Record has a printed circulation that is now less than 2,000 copies a day. Mind-boggling, but true. Both papers are defendants in the suit.
The county’s idea is to put legal ads on its website, or perhaps a government site created for that purpose.
With the suit filed, the state Legislature quickly devised an interim solution. Beginning now and continuing through the end of March, legal notices can be placed on a newspaper website. Cost will be the same as the print newspaper.
As anyone can see, that solution is very interim. Counties like Warren want to save money by placing notices on their own website.
A hearing on the suit had been scheduled for today, Monday, but was postponed until Feb. 26 because of the legislation.
It’s certainly possible that between now and then, the Legislature will end the mandate that legal ads be published only in printed – or now online – newspapers.
Both the Star Ledger and the Daily Record have filed briefs with the court arguing that the new status quo – legal notices on newspaper websites – become the norm.
The Ledger’s brief notes that despite a circulation that has dwindled to about 75,000, (print and online) it still “dwarfs” the circulation of all other publications in New Jersey. UGH! That is a pretty sad comment on the state’s media operations.
The brief also says that a government entity self-publishing legal notices would “present inherent conflicts of interest that would be adverse to the public’s interests.” And that, “public entities lack the experience in publishing that likely would lead to errors, omissions and technical difficulties. There are no such concerns with The Star-Ledger’s legal notices.”
This truly is a pretty dubious argument. Legal notices are not editorials, investigative journalism, or even journalism at all.
In many cases, they are rather dry notices of official government action. Hard to see how, say, a school board would be unable to handle that.
The Daily Record in its brief says current law does not have a circulation threshold.
- But should we not use some common sense?
A printed circulation – and I am being charitable here – of less than 2,000 begs a logical question:
Why print legal ads in a publication that very few people read?
(I spent 25 years working for the Daily Record, so it pains me to write that, but facts are facts.)
One should not be surprised if the Legislature allows Warren and everyone else to put notices on their own websites.
In his reply to the newspapers’ briefs, Bell notes the trend of “local media outlets reducing hardcopy geographical presence …”
How true.
But corporate ownership – think Gannett – of New Jersey newspapers has reduced not only geographic presence, but local news presence.
And that’s why readership is dropping and why this is an issue in the first place.
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