Who Noticed

The state saved taxpayers money and better served the public in the process.

Or: … The state put another dagger into an independent press and deprived the public of vital information in the process.

A new public-notice policy implemented Thursday by the state judicial system prompted those two opposite interpretations.

The system decided to start posting legal notices to its own website rather than in print newspapers as of Jan. 2. (Click here to read the Judicial Branch’s explanation of the change, which will enable all parties in cases to file court-ordered legal notices at no charge. Click here to read a Meriden Record-Journal editorial opposing it.)

Following is an exchange about the merits or dangers of that decision, beginning with an email sent to statewide journalists by veteran Connecticut newsman Chris Powell and continuing with responses by him and New Haven Independent Editor Paul Bass:

The Original Story: News Organizations Up In Arms

From: Chris Powell
Dec 26, 2019, 11:23 AM

Connecticut courts moving notices from newspapers to website

By Dave Collins
Associated Press
Thursday, December 25, 2019

HARTFORD — The Connecticut court system will usher in the new year by moving required public notices to its website and out of newspapers, citing lower costs and the potential to reach a wider audience.

Media representatives, however, believe the move will result in fewer residents being informed of important legal matters and will be another blow to news companies already dealing with huge declines in revenues. A single public notice can cost a few hundred dollars to run in a newspaper.

It’s a concept that’s been debated by government officials across the country, but so far one that appears to have gained little traction amid opposition by newspapers.

“State government’s thirst for keeping information out of the public hands knows no bounds,” said Chris VanDeHoef, executive director of the Connecticut Daily Newspapers Association. ​“Every branch of government in our state should be focused on getting information that is pertinent to the citizens of Connecticut out in as many places possible — not fewer.”

The Connecticut Judicial Branch has set up a legal notices section on its website that will go live on Jan. 2, when it ends the requirement to publish them in newspapers.

“It is expected that this will save a great deal of time and expense, and provide greater accuracy and broader notice than newspaper publication,” the Judicial Branch said in a statement on its website announcing the move.

Most of the notices at issue are intended for people involved in civil and family court cases, usually defendants, who cannot be located because their current addresses are unknown. While a good portion of the publishing costs are paid for by litigants, the Judicial Branch foots the bill for a large number of people who cannot afford it, officials said.

Judicial Branch officials said they could not immediately provide figures on how much the judiciary spends on legal notices or how many legal notices it pays for each year, because that information is not separated out in record keeping of advertising costs.

But they said moving the notices to the branch’s website definitely will save litigants and the government money because the postings will be free. They also said the online postings will provide broader notice because they will appear in internet searches for the names of the people mentioned in the notices.

“If you Google yourself, it (the notice) will be picked up in a Google search,” said Krista Hess, court operations director at the Judicial Branch.

Current and former news executives disagree that the Judicial Branch website has a greater reach than newspapers and news websites.

“Nobody goes to a government agency internet site unless he already is looking for something specifically,” said Chris Powell, former managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester and an executive board member of the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information.

“Government agency internet sites don’t have general audiences. But newspapers still do,” he said. ​“As a result, newspapers continue to provide a real opportunity for regular people to get notice of things they would not ordinarily be aware of or know to look for.”

Powell also said legal notices help support newspapers and their government watchdog roles.

There also were several bills introduced in this year’s state legislative session that would have eliminated the requirement that local governments post their public notices in newspapers and allowed them to use their websites instead. None of them passed.

Across the country, bills in 11 state legislatures called for removing most public notices from newspapers, but none made it out of committee, according to the Public Notice Resource Center. The center was founded in 2003 by the American Court and Commercial Newspapers Inc., which represents newspapers that report on legal and commercial matters.

Hess said discussions about moving the notices to the website began several years ago after a court official read about how Alaska put its legal notices on its judiciary website. She said Alaska has since seen an increase in defendants who could not be located responding to court requests since it began posting notices online.

Alaska court officials have said they moved notices to the court system’s website because they found newspaper publication ineffective, expensive and outdated due to society’s reliance on the internet and social media.

-END-

Response To Powell: ​“Better For Society”

To: Chris Powell
From: Paul Bass

Hi Chris. Thanks for sharing this!

I have to admit I disagree with you on philosophical grounds — to your right! (For a change.)

I would love for us to continue getting the money for legal notices. I actually publish some of them.

But I think it is much better for society to have government spend less money while making this information available to everyone, whether or not they buy a newspaper.

I don’t think government should be in the business of subsidizing private corporations, including newspapers. Rather than supporting a watchdog mission, inefficient government corporate welfare in the form of paid legal notices perpetuates a nefarious bond between elected public officials and hand-picked elite corporate newspaper owners. True independent local journalism will need to survive with support from readers, not insider politicians and government bureaucrats. Trying to use our waning and undeserved Fourth Estate power to bully elected officials who still fear not being being endorsed in ever-less-read newspaper editorials is not a recipe to keep alive watchdog journalism. It is a recipe for ignoring technological change and the wisdom of the free market in favor of trying to prop up a failing business model that deserves to be thrown into the trash heap. It is a recipe to keep Blockbuster VHS rentals alive in an era of Netflix, metaphorically applied to news reporting.

And I think people can pretty quickly figure out how to look for information on a free website rather than in printed newspapers almost nobody buys. That eventually will reach more citizens regardless of ability to pay, making government more transparent.

Wait: weren’t you supposed to be the government-weary Libertarian?

Fondly,

Paul

Powell’s Response: ​“Check Against Concealment”

To: Paul Bass
From: Chris Powell

Thanks, Paul. I always have acknowledged the subsidy issue here but I think it’s subordinate to the issue of actual notice. Do government internet sites provide more actual notice than print or internet newspapers do? I don’t think the Judicial Department has addressed that point. Indeed, I doubt that the department has any measure of its internet site’s audience. And once the legal notice requirement in newspapers is repealed, I doubt that any government agency will do its best to provide actual notice for anything that might prove inconvenient to the agency itself. The legal notice requirement as it stands is a check against concealment. Repeal it and there will be no check.

In any case the Judicial Department isn’t terminating the newspaper ads because it thinks it can reach an equal or larger audience with its internet site. It’s terminating the ads simply to save money as more of its budget is consumed by staff compensation, which has been placed largely outside ordinary democratic control, along with the rest of government personnel expenses.

I don’t really want the press relying so much on government subsidies either. But enlarging such subsidies to keep serious news organizations in business seems to be a trend in some jurisdictions, like Canada, insofar as nobody seems able to devise an alternative that keeps serious news coming. The old business model of newspapers is certainly failing but as much as I wish it success I don’t think the charity model used by the Independent, the Mirror, and other internet operations constitutes a business model. The charity model leaves news organizations vulnerable to the political influence of its own major donors more comprehensively than the old newspaper business model leaves newspapers vulnerable to the political influence of major advertisers. Macy’s doesn’t care much about Medicare expansion, Afghanistan, or binding arbitration of government employee union contracts. But the rich ideologues of the charity model do. 

The real problem, I think, is simply the steady decline in civic engagement and educational levels. You may remember the journalism seminar you and I attended at Southern maybe 25 years ago, which is where this decline first slapped me in the face. The journalism professors told us that they were finding their aspiring journalism majors so ignorant that they could not identify the three branches of government. (You know — the teacher unions, the lawyers, and the liquor stores.) So, the professors said, they had created a civics course and made it mandatory for aspiring majors. I began to wonder how anyone got out of a public high school in Connecticut without knowing the three branches of government, and how anyone got into a public university without knowing.

Today about a quarter of the eligible adult population in Connecticut doesn’t even register to vote.

So I think the bigger financial problem for news organizations is the decline of citizenship.

I don’t have a personal financial stake in this issue anymore. I’m not on any news organization’s payroll and have no ownership interest in any news organizations. I don’t charge for my columns; of course nobody would pay anyway. My dirty little secret is that if I had any money I’d pay to be published, especially now that Hearst has bought up half the state’s dailies and most of its weeklies and has blacklisted me. Today I can get published only in the state’s few remaining family-owned papers. But I’m afraid that getting published anywhere these days increasingly does little more than feed my vanity when there are fewer and fewer people interested in public life.

As for my being ​“a government-weary libertarian,” it’s a mistaken stereotype. I often have written lately against the plutocracy’s control of the economy, against the constant stupid imperial wars, and in favor of adopting a Singapore-style system in which people are enabled to use their government social-insurance withholdings to buy their own housing instead of being perpetual vassals of the Jared Kushners of the world, who scoff up government housing subsidies. I may have been the only Republican in Connecticut to endorse Obamacare years ago, not because it was perfect but because it was the only option on offer, a step toward decency.

As is their right, people read and remember only what they want to, but I don’t have to like it:

https://www.journalinquirer.com/public/the-lament-of-the-last-liberal-in-connecticut/article_b829e8c2-7149 – 5b63-9802-c703fbe7feeb.html

Anyway, thanks for your efforts with the Independent. I do follow the Independent every day, and while I can’t stand the constant excuse making for illegal immigration and the failure to put critical questions to its advocates, it often seems to me that nobody else ever puts critical questions to city government.

Stay well in a happy new year.

cp

Response To Powell: The Future Is Bright!

To: Chris Powell
From: Paul Bass

Thank you for the thoughtful response!

I’ve always admired your work and think you’re a terrific writer and columnist. I hope you keep plugging.

While I agree with the bulk of your analysis, I’m less pessimistic than you are about the future of local news. I just think we are in a period of transition.

I agree with you about the charitable model not being the right one for the long term. (It proved the right one for the past decade during this transition.) I think the pay wall is starting to succeed at a national level and will soon succeed at the local level. People just have to figure out how many reporters can be supported by the core group of parents, meeting attendees, block watch members, teachers, business people, and others who care about what happens in their community and will soon be willing to pay $10 a month for learning more about it and debating the issues with other people who care.

I think the future is bright and eventually all communities will have teams of reporters doing better work than ever, supported by a wide range of paid subscribers rather than one large interest group or advertisers or government. Our time may have passed. But I foresee a Chris Powell in every community five years from now making a living doing great work and making a difference.

Best, P

Powell Responds: Civic Crisis Runs Deeper

To: Paul Bass
From: Chris Powell

I hope you’re right about the future. I just don’t think your vision is likely to come to pass while half the kids coming out of our education system are almost comprehensively ignorant. Forget that they’ll never be newspaper readers or readers of anything bearing on civic life; they’ll never even be citizens in any meaningful sense. The schools are proletarianizing the country. I suspect that this is the idea.

Certainly the internet can almost eliminate distribution costs for newspapers, thereby saving a lot of money. But it seems that internet advertising at news sites produces revenue only for the largest national news organizations. It doesn’t seem to be producing much for local news organizations. So this income stream becomes unrecoverable. Further, I’m skeptical that many people will ever pay for what they can get free, and even if pay walls eventually work, they won’t prevent a subscriber from copying material and sending it free to non-subscribers. I could possibly imagine ideologues of left and right contributing financially to politically congenial news sites that were more or less free, but it’s hard for me to imagine people who are NOT ideologically motivated making regular voluntary and essentially charitable payments to support any news organization that applied skepticism across the political spectrum.

To undertake journalism is already pretty much to take a vow of poverty. The only money left that arises from literacy and civic engagement is paid to those who are hired by one special interest or another to destroy the public interest. Connecticut already has far more lobbyists and publicists for government agencies and special interests than it has journalists.

If we want a better public life, we have to get a better public.