Monday's print MDL puts out the word that the old media is trying to keep government bodies from jumping to the new media by offering to do new media for them: the South Dakota Newspaper Association has created www.SDPublicNotices.com, an online archive of public and legal notices. Agendas, meeting minutes, publication of resolutions and ordinances—now all available in searchable form on the Internet... once they've been paid for and published in the print editions of the SDNA's member papers.
Now one of the great advantages of the Internet is that it allows us to get our information straight from the source, without filtering through corporate interests. Heck, we can participate in putting that information out there ourselves. SDNA general manager David Bordewyk demonstrates old media's complete disconnect from that new media philosophy by insisting the exact opposite:
Local officials have argued that they can eliminate the expense of publishing the notices in newspapers and instead put those notices on their own Web sites, Bordewyk said.
"There's no need for local governments to go to the expense to do that," the SDNA executive said. "There's a cost for them to do it, too. They can't do it for nothing."
"Secondly, by the fact that they're published first and foremost in newspapers, it's a bona fide third-party publication. It's an independent third-party verification of a public notice. It is not government publishing this itself, and that's historically why notices, in large part, were published in newspapers because it provides third-party independent verification of that publication" ["Public Notices Put on Web," AP via Madison Daily Leader, 2008.06.23, p.14].
Independent verification? Um, when I submit the minutes from Lake Herman Sanitary District meetings for publication, the Leader never calls me back to check what I've written. All I get is the bill.
But let's not haggle over philosophical differences between old and new media; let's take this public notice website for a test drive!
The main page offers a search box (click image to enlarge) with lots of fun options. I can set "Items per page" to 10, 25, and on up to 1000 (now that's four-whell-drive search!). One option, fuzzy searching, lets you set the degree of tolerance for misspelling (no indication of whether it will help you find legal mention of Sibby and myself faster). The date selector lets you go all the way back to 1990 and even forward to 2012 (cool! I can fast forward to see if I win the 2012 school board election!). However, a note in the adjacent frame says, "Due to the time sensitive nature of the material contained on this website, notices over three months old are automatically removed."Time sensitive? What the school board put in the budget is less time-sensitive than a three-month window of interest. Hmm....
So I try out a search. I enter "Madison Central School Board" in the search box, ask the system to search for the exact phrase, select 25 entries per page, set File Date between Jan 2001 and Jun 2008, and narrow the search to Lake County and the Madison Daily Leader:
Oops. I'm pretty sure the Madison Central School Board has conducted some business in the past seven years.So I change the search criterion to "all of the words" and get 64 results. Unfortunately, those results are not restricted to legal notices. The links open slow PDF format copies of the original newspaper pages—not just the legal notice of interest, but the whole darn page, complete with the "Good Old Days" columns, obits, photos, and all sorts of other extraneous material.
I click on the first link; two and a half minutes later, up comes a PDF of page 3 of June 13's MDL. There is a news story about the board's upcoming meeting to consider applicants for the vacant seat on the board. I try the second link; the SDNA burns another two minutes of my life, and I get a page full of legals... but the only one relevant to the school board is the minutes of the June 3 Prairie Lakes Educational Cooperative meeting. The third link doesn't even mention our school district. Hmmm....
I try something a little more fun: I search "Heidelberger." Let's see how many times my relatives and I have gotten our noses into official government business. There's a little better luck here, but the results drag up non-legal content. The search results include mentions in the April 16 Tyndall Tribune & Register and the April 17 Platte Enterprise of my Uncle Howard and Aunt Bev's presentation on tree care at a garden program in Parkston, letters to the editor in the April 7 MDL concerning my candidacy for the school board (oddly, no sign of Heather's letter).
All those PDFs, with no speedier text option, demonstrate that the SDNA is still more interested in spotlighting its print product than providing an optimal searchable online database. I could provide the governmental agencies of Lake County a faster, more user-friendly archive of legal notices by pasting their text into a separate Blogspot site and letting users rely on the built-in Blogger search bar.
Such an independent website would also be accessible through regular search engines. As it stands right now, I'm betting Google can't access the SDNA's content. (Try Googling "Madison 'Lake County Commission' minutes April 2008" and see what comes up.) Folks looking for minutes of the Lake County commission won't find them if they use Google, Yahoo, or the other usual tools; they have to know that the SDNA is offering this service and go specifically to the SDNA website to access their restricted and slow archive. I guess I'll have to do the public service of blogging about SDNA's project so it gets some Google juice and people can find it.
The SDNA's online archive of public notices is better than nothing. The information in all those agendae and minutes and other notices may not be available online anywhere else— Lake County's website has absolutely no document archives, and I sure can't blog about everything going on with the school boards, township boards, and other entities in our fair county. Of course, in the time it takes to download the PDFs from SDNA, you could probably just call your school secretary or county auditor and get the information you need straight from the source.
But the bigger problem is that, as usual, the old media seem more concerned with protecting the market share of a fading product rather than using new technology to provide the best possible public service.
SDNA is simply trying to take away an argument that favors allowing entities to post their minutes and official business on their respective websites. Counties, Cities, School Districts and other governnment groups could save millions of dollars a year in what is known as a cash cow for newspapers who lobby heavily each year to maintain their monopoly of printing public notice in the newspaper in an electronic world.
ReplyDeleteThey fail to tell you that newspaper subscriptions are down over 30% the past 10 years. Find a young person that subscribes to the Argus? As older subscribers die, nobody is picking up subscriptions at the youthful end, and that is creating a gap that could leave out over 50% of residents who don't subscribe, so either rates for legals need to decrease or move to the web. Posting public notices online and providing copies to local libraries, grocery stores, etc., would be cost effective and those newspaper advertising dollars could be diverted into solving other issues in cash-strapped budgets. Imagine the savings for the City of Sioux Falls or the Sioux Falls School District if they could post their legals on their websites for all to see. Libraries across the state allow free internet use, so there would be no subcription cost.
We are in a transitional period where a lot of older people especially would never go on line to review legal notices. When we get to the point the internet has been part of everyone's learning curve then it would be reasonable to post them simply on line. Until then your grandmother should have access to the legal notices in a way she understands.
ReplyDeleteI don't know about your grandma, but mine can't read the tiny print of the legals anymore. Too much stuff, too little space, too tiny font size.
ReplyDeleteA successful newspaper is absolutely vital to the community. It helps bring the community together.
ReplyDeleteWhere else can local businesses advertise their services?
Where else can you keep up on local issues?
If there were not a Madison Daily Leader, there would not be a Madville Times.
If you want to save money by not informing the public, then start charging for access to public records of meetings.
Local media are vital to keeping a community together. If there were not a Madison Daily Leader, I'd build one.
ReplyDelete