Nov 19, 2022 3 min read

In last weekend’s Observer-Reporter, Buffalo Township in Washington County and Greensboro borough in Greene County placed legal notices for meetings in December where 2023 budgets will be considered for adoption. The Tri-County Joint Municipal Authority placed a notice for a special meeting this past Wednesday and the McGuffey School District is requesting proposals for district copiers, as per a notice it placed.

Sure, probably none of these notices are as widely read as the latest Steelers update or the newest “Dilbert” comic strip. But public notices serve a crucial function in keeping residents and taxpayers apprised about what public institutions are up to, and for decades they have appeared in print newspapers of general circulation within the communities these entities serve.

As the worldwide web has grown, some officials in Pennsylvania and in other parts of the country have argued that public notices should no longer be placed in print newspapers, and that they instead should be put on the web. As long ago as 2016, Republican Gov. Chris Christie in New Jersey was attempting to yank notices out of his state’s newspapers, according to an Associated Press article. Closer to home, Scott Township in Allegheny County has asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that it be relieved of its obligation to place public notices in a print newspaper due to the ongoing strike of several unions at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. One of Scott’s commissioners told the Tribune-Review that the township is “essentially unable to function” because of the Post-Gazette’s strike, and, among other things, neither budgets nor ordinances could be adopted, and no special meetings could be scheduled because they could not advertise them.

But, when contacted by the Tribune-Review, Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania News Media Association, pointed out, “A society changes and newspapers change to reflect the communities they serve. There are large groups that still don’t have the means for digital-only distribution. You can’t just plop something online and say it’s the same thing as a newspaper. We are not a fully connected society so the law cannot say we are a fully connected society – that will cut out a portion of the population.”

Last year, the Public Notice Resource Center noted that eliminating public notices from print newspapers would also eliminate “the historical record they represent.”

“The relative inviolability of newspapers has long been an essential element in their role as heralds of public notice. Their archival capacity helps to ensure published notices will be available for future use by the judicial system, researchers and historians.”

Things can vanish on the internet without warning. Newspapers offer permanence.

No matter how times or seasons change, public notices belong in newspapers.