One of the perennial concerns of many small newspapers rests in the business of publishing public notices.

It is a very old business in the United States, but one that no one is sure will survive in its current form. State and local governments for years have threatened to “roll their own” Web sites in a move that some government officials contend would still satisfy the original intent of the practice of using public notices to notify the public at large.

The long-held practice of requiring disclosure of government activity is at least as old as the government itself.

Public notice laws have been a part of government structure since the first session of the first U.S. Congress, writes Shannon E. Martin, a professor of communication and journalism at the University of Maine.

“In 1789 the new congress declared that all legislative actions and executive decisions would be published in at least three public newspapers so that all citizens would know what government was doing,” he said.

Here in Colorado, the notice laws, which are more than 100 years old, prescribe specific rules that govern which newspapers even fit the criteria to enable them to become a “legal” newspaper.

Many other states’ requirements are similarly stringent. But newspaper trade organizations and press associations battle changes to the law on a continuous basis.

As National Newspaper Association Public Policy Director Tonda Rush wrote earlier this year, a company called GlobalNotice Inc. spurred legislation and proposals in at least a dozen states to migrate their public notices from local newspapers to an online site.

“The company proposes what would essentially be an online franchise for public notices,” Rush wrote. “It has floated ideas in various states for funding a national Web site that would aggregate notices, quoting process as low as $10 per notice. It suggests in some places sharing the revenue for the notices with public bodies, such as court clerks,” Rush wrote in Publishers Auxiliary, the NNA’s newspaper.

Delaware-based GlobalNotice argues that it is an efficient alternative to the old way of doing things.

“It is difficult to describe the present system of notice as anything but inefficient, fragmented, and unfair to most potentially interested members of the public,” the company says on its Web site. “The current legal requirements and methodology governing legal public notice have not changed since the 17th century and are painfully outdated.”

Lack of credibility?

Critics of the company say that plans to share revenue with government entities indicate a lack of independence needed to insure credibility.

The relative unstableness of the Internet is also mentioned as a serious flaw in the company’s plan.

But part of the responsibility for improving public notice effectiveness rests with newspapers. Too many of us take both the business and the responsibility for granted. We print the notices in barely readable type and stuff them into out-of-the-way corners of the publication.

Many businesses and lawyers intentionally search out and use obscure but “legal” publications in the hope that very few readers will actually spot such notices. Many public trustees, clerks and other officials follow the letter of the laws, without giving a thought to the spirit.

The laws were put in place to provide an independent method of keeping abreast of what government is doing.

The Public Notice Resource Center, an organization founded in 2003 and supported by various government organizations and press associations, offers these and other best-practices guidelines for publishing notices correctly:

•Governments should make public notices understandable, and not use arcane and confusing language.

•Governments should ensure that the public is involved in all decisions affecting their daily lives. Notice should be published whenever a decision or debate will affect the populace. By keeping the citizens informed, the government will better represent the needs of the people.

•Newspapers should strive to be experts in public notices. By mastering the process of publishing a notice, a newspaper can cement itself in the community as the place to go for public notices. And they should explain to readers the importance of public notices and the newspaper’s role in publishing them.

•Newspapers should highlight the public notice section of their Web sites when they post the printed notice to the sites.  Public notices should be set apart from other sections so that they are easily found and viewed.