To the editor:
At long last, via SB437 and HB3431, Oregon lawmakers are considering legislation that could end wasteful spending on public notices in newspapers.
It’s appropriate that the 2025 Legislature should tackle the problem in this session, while priorities set at the very top this year target substance abuse. Newspapers, after all, are battling addiction.
Owners have been pained and saddened by the changes around them. Instead of working to leverage the changes to their own benefit, many have sought to dull the pain with a steady intravenous drip – a drip of the powerful opioid that is public funds.
Even if you haven’t put $1.50 in quarters in a rusting newspaper rack in months, you are contributing to the profits of its owner. You are underwriting the business that has sacked your local reporters and left editors to scramble for resources. You are paying rent on the new office that’s located two towns away, since the owners closed your local newspaper and consolidated it with one down the road. You are paying for all this because your local city, county, water district, school district and more are forced, by law, to pay to publish their budgets and announcements in that newspaper, even if your community is no longer reading it. This despite the fact they could publish those same notices for far less using legitimate local online news sources, or even for free by sharing them on their websites, or a state-run website.
Why are agencies doing this? Why are they paying tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars of local tax revenue – your tax dollars – not to hire new police officers or teachers, but instead to underwrite the newspaper you once relied upon for accurate local news coverage? Because state law requires it.
Let’s be clear, “public notices” or “legal notices” in the modern age amount to nothing more than a subsidy. It’s a subsidy to an industry that could find legitimate ways to be successful but has decided it is much easier to sit back, ignore the changing world around it, and live off taxpayer support.
Newspaper readers across Oregon know they are receiving smaller, less frequent, and less robust editions than they once did. Editors rightly complain of lack of staff, and some are reduced to mainly repackaging press releases.
As times and technology have changed, too many newspaper chains have refused to. They use the funds raked in via these public notice requirements to underwrite their operations, thus squeezing the market and making it more difficult for creative, innovative print and online upstarts to compete – as these new competitors aren’t yet “newspapers of record,” and are thus automatically at a disadvantage.
In 2005, my wife and I co-founded a weekly publication serving two counties on the Oregon coast. Even then, we knew the new axiom of the age – Information Yearns to Be Free, a truism old media ignored for too long. Our publication was built on free distribution, and no-cost access online. But it was packed with lively original writing and photography, and even scrapping against the formidable competition of three established old-media publications, we thrived.
Today, now under new ownership, that publication is still growing, and is approaching its 20th birthday. It’s still innovating, and winning readers and advertisers with attention to quality and engagement with the community. The competition? There are no longer three traditional newspapers delivering five editions a week. Consolidation has left just two, each publishing once a week, with a total staff less than one-tenth of the group of professionals that served our counties before. And circulation has plummeted.
An editorial from a large Oregon newspaper group recently warned that turning off the spigot of free money “will lead to more profits being picked off by websites that only do the minimum.” That “only do the minimum?” When was the last time your local newspaper’s owner expanded its news staff, added publication days, or took any steps that were anything other than “the minimum” to get by?
In a world without the unfair advantage of public funds, new competitors will thrive. The public demands news coverage all across Oregon. Create a vacuum of this coverage, and talented newspeople and entrepreneurs will fill it.
A case in point is here in Lincoln County where, as the old newspapers have consolidated and slashed staff, The Yachats News/Lincoln Chronicle, an upstart online news source founded by a former Oregonian editor, is thriving and expanding, winning readers, advertisers and grant support, and hiring news staff that now outnumbers that of its print competition.
When owners of groups of newspapers cry that without subsidies paid by the Oregon taxpayer, news coverage will disappear and local governments will get away with murder without the Fourth Estate keeping a close watch, look closer. They’ve tried to paint anyone who’s supportive of this Bill as being opposed to the First Amendment. Phooey.
Wherever you live in Oregon, attend your local city council. A school board meeting. A fire district board meeting. The county commission meeting. Is the local newspaper there? Not likely. What’s more likely is that some overworked editor in a newsroom three towns away is going to email the public relations director the next day, asking them to “email me some details, and please answer these five questions.”
There is a critical need for robust local and state news coverage in our society – arguably now more than ever. But, as newspaper readers know all too well, we are no longer getting it from the industry, which has learned how to generate a steady profit not from journalism, but by building a vehicle designed first and foremost to publish paid notices that don’t need to be printed in the first place. These would-be watchdogs of waste are only thriving due to what is, from any objective viewpoint, categorically wasteful spending.
Take away the subsidy, and level the playing field. Provide a fair chance for all those online and print news providers who are surviving by delivering high-quality coverage and finding creative ways to generate revenue, rather than being lulled into complacency by endless taxpayer support. Allow verified news websites and other sources to distribute public notices at a fraction of current costs, or do it via state-owned websites. Municipalities, fire districts, and a whole host of other public agencies will be saved millions in taxpayer funds, all across the state.
Oregon will be amazed at the journalists and entrepreneurs who are waiting in the wings to show that a fresh approach, creativity, and embracing rather than ignoring new technologies can not only spur the creation of successful local businesses across Oregon but can help ensure a watchful eye is kept on local and state government and those we entrust with leadership roles in our communities.
It’s time for newspapers to shake their addiction to public notices once and for all. Withdrawals are painful, and sometimes difficult to watch. But there’s nothing better than meeting a recovered addict back at the office, working with new energy and drive. Who can tell what this laudable and beloved industry can accomplish once it’s finally kicked the habit, pulled the needle from its veins, and sees with clear eyes the promise and profits waiting in this new media landscape.
— Dave Price/Lincoln City
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