HARRISBURG PA – Pennsylvania newspaper publishers fought hard Thursday (May 19, 2011) to keep revenue they earn by printing legal notices that municipalities like Lower Pottsgrove (PA) Township must display before passing laws, signing contracts, or buying equipment.

Publishers told the House Local Government Committee, during a hearing in Harrisburg, that proposed legislation which would allow legal notices to appear on websites instead of in local papers could cost thousands of reporters’ jobs. Government officials, on the other hand, accused publishers of simply trying to protect an advertising monopoly, The Pennsylvania Independent online news service reported.

• Read a story by reporter Darwyyn Deyo, titled “1,000 jobs hang in balance under PA publication proposal” and published Thursday by The Independent, here.

Headlines And Deadlines, the PNA newsletter

The Pennsylvania Newspaper Association (PNA), the publishers’ lobbying group, “would have you believe that townships just want to hide critical information,” said Elan Herr, assistant executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of Township Supervisors. “Instead, they will tell you only daily or weekly newspapers of general circulation can be trusted to provide this critical service, printing legal notices near the back of the paper at exorbitant rates.”

Township association members think they can save taxpayers thousands of dollars annually by putting legal notices where publishers themselves say their readers have moved: online.

Publishers have already heard – nine months ago from a Lower Pottsgrove resident – five suggestions on how they might better satisfy their municipal customers, keep the public better informed, and possibly save their battle for legal revenue.

Joe Zlomek of Sanatoga, former publisher and chief operating officer of The (Pottstown PA) Mercury newspaper and now managing editor of The Sanatoga Post and The Post Publications, was asked last year by PNA to offer his thoughts on promoting and using legal notices. In an article titled “Get your public to notice public notices,” which appeared in the Sept. 17 (2010) edition of PNA’s newsletter “Headlines And Deadlines,” Zlomek proposed that publishers:

• Train their readers by printing, on the newspaper’s front page, a daily text box that provides a short title for and a short description of each public notice published that day, and the page on which it appears. “Give it a week and people will look for it,” Zlomek wrote. “Give it a month and it can be as well read as the comics or the obits;”

• Digitally duplicate the same text box on their newspaper website’s home page, and permanently link each individual description directly to a corresponding notice online;

• Have their newsrooms write stories weekly that refer to legal notices. “Run a small feature … in print and online that describes and links to locally related, interesting, or quirky public notices published by your paper or by others, either within the same ownership group or (gasp!) among competitors,” Zlomek told publishers. “It helps your publication as much as the other guy’s;”

• Push more than paper by creating an Adobe Acrobat document (PDF) from each individual legal notice and providing the digital copy to legal advertisers for posting on their websites. “Municipal governments, in particular, will appreciate such service,” Zlomek wrote; and

• Notify legal advertisers by letting them know how newspapers were “adding value for the money … by giving greater exposure to this important advertising. Invite, and promptly reply to, (municipalities’) feedback and suggestions.”

To date few, if any, publishers heeded the advice.