Opinion: End Corporate Welfare For Newspapers

By Art Gallagher

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New Jersey’s “legacy media” is so desperate to remain dependent on government subsidies in the form of mandated legal advertisements that their trade association, the New Jersey Press Association, offered to cut the advertising rates for taxpayer funded ads in half so long as they could increase the fees for legal ads paid for by private parties.

The newspaper industry was caught off guard earlier this week when legislation to allow New Jersey’s governments to publish meeting dates, proposed ordinances, zoning applications, sheriff sales, etc., online rather than in daily or weekly newspapers was introduced and fast tracked for approval before the end of the year.  Since then they papers been editorializing to rally their readers to put pressure on the legislature to scrap the bill and save their revenue.  Their arguments have been unseemly; Governor Chris Christie is pushing the bill as revenge on newspapers for their coverage of the Bridgegate scandal, that the elimination of legal ads would lead to less transparency and chicanery on the part of government officials who might not publish the ads as the law requires and that municipal and county governments publishing their own legal notices on the web won’t lead to savings.

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APP: Public contracts should be online. Why not public notices?

This morning The Asbury Park Press argues in an editorial that public labor contracts should be posted online.  They argued that municipalites that don’t have websites that can handle such postings should post them on the Department of Community Affairs’ site.

We agree.   While we’re at it, why not public notices that municipalities, school boards and private sector zoning and planning applicants now pay millions per year to advertise in newspapers where very few people see them?

During the last legislative session a bi-partisan bill that would have given jurisdictions the option of advertising legal notices  in newspapers or online was passed in committee and scheduled for a vote in both houses of the legislature on the last day of the session.  It met fierce resistance from the newspaper industry in committee and before that scheduled vote.

The corporate welfare recipients of the newspaper industry argued that politicians would use the choice to punish newspapers who didn’t give them favorable coverage, and that the savings wasn’t that much, if anything.  In their final push to kill the bill, which worked, they argued that some towns don’t have websites that could handle the ads.

The legislature’s Democratic leadership, Senate President Stephen Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Shelia Oliver, killed the bill by not letting their chambers vote on it.

Well, thanks to the good nudniks of Neptune, The Asbury Presseditorial board, we now have a solution to the problem of a small number of towns not having websites that can handle posting legal notices.  Notice publication could be a shared service hosting by the Department of Community Affairs or by the counties.

Sweeney has already announced that the legal notice bill will not be a priority in the legislative session that just started, signaling to the reformers that support they bill that they shouldn’t bother.  Now that The Asbury Park Press has come up with a solution to the newspaper industry’s latest objection, maybe Sweeney will reconsider.

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Change is inevitable for the post office…..and newspapers

The Neptune Nudniks got one right today. 

In their editorial, Change inevitable for post office, The Asbury Park Press editorial board accurately spells out how the Internet and digital technology has changed the economics of information delivery, making the United States Postal Service obsolete and insolvent.  

The post office is undergoing a major downsizing. Appropriately so because people are just not using it they way we used to.  Electronic exchange of documents and information is just far more efficient than physically moving paper across town or across the country.

The Press concludes that, “we cannot subsidize what should be a self-sustaining entity any more than we could subsidize the buggy whip industry at the turn of the last century.”

That unassailable reasoning should also be applied to the subsidies the newspaper industry receives in the form of state mandated legal and public notices advertising.

Classified advertisings in newspapers has gone the way of the buggy whip industry. It has been replaced by craigslist, ebay, autotrader.com, realtor.com, realtytrac.com, and countless other websites.  The once thick classified sections of newspapers are now four or five pages daily, half of which is government compelled legal and public notices.

Bi-partisan legislation, The Electronic Publication Of Legal Notices Act, passed the State Senate in July of 2010 and the Assembly Commerce and Economic Development Committee in February of this year.  Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver has blocked the bill from being voted on by the full Assembly.

With millions of dollars in government mandated subsidies at stake, the newspaper industry came out in force to lobby against the bill arguing that legal notices on government websites instead of in newspapers really wouldn’t save the government money, that poor people without computers would not have access to the vital information( do poor people attend foreclosure auctions and zoning board hearings?) and that elected officials could use the power to withhold legal notice advertisements to punish newspapers for unfavorable news coverage.  The newspaper publishers said that their role as unbiased watchdogs would be compromised.

The assertion that newspapers fill the role of unbiased watchdogs is laughable.   Yesterday’s Star Ledger editorial laying out a strategy for Democrats to counter Governor Christie’s effective Town Hall meetings, along with the paper’s slanted “news” coverage of Christie’s meetings eariler in the week is just one recent example of how “newspapers” are just as biased as this or any other blog.

But the publishers’ argument that allowing newspaper advertising and/or Internet advertising on governement websites of Legal Notices gives government officials the power to punish newspapers whose coverage they don’t approve of (or to reward newspapers for coverage they do approve of) has merit.

That potential for abuse could be fixed by amending the Electronic Publication Of Legal Notices Act to require that legal notices be published only on government websites.  Reasonable fees for ads that are now paid to newspapers by planning and zoning applicants, foreclosing lenders and other private interests that are compelled to advertise could be collected by the municipalities to offset the cost of maintaining their websites and as a new source of much needed revenue.

The rest of New Jersey’s traditional media should embrace The Asbury Park Press’s outstanding reasoning, as it applies to the post office, and apply it to themselves in the interests of the public good. They should let Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver off the hook and suggest she post The Electronic Publication Of Legal Notices Act for a vote before the full Assembly where their friends in the chamber should amend the bill to prohibit governments from spending taxpayers dollars on legal notice advertising and eliminate the requirement that private interests pay to advertise anywhere other than on a government website.

Of course, the 1st amendment would allow the newspapers to continue publishing the notices, as a public service, or as a private sector revenue driven profit center.

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