The Westfield Leader and Union County HAWK have long held that editorials and opinions do not belong on the front page with news articles and facts. Today, we are breaking that tradition for the first time since I bought the paper in 2020 to talk about a potentially detrimental move that could strip away one of the most important levels of governmental accountability that we have available to us in this state and potentially our existence as a print publication.

Some legislators, the League of Municipalities, the New Jersey School Boards Association and the New Jersey Association of Counties are looking to take legal notices away from the newspapers and in turn, from you, the public. In the same year when the legislature gutted the Open Public Records Act, we could all be further plunged into the darkness when it comes to government oversight.

Simply said, you are not going to know when they are going to put a cell tower in your backyard or allow a condo development around the corner — because they will bury the notices on their own websites, which garner little traffic. And you will never hear about it because state and local journalism will be gone.

As journalists, we recognize the validity of adapting our methodologies to better fit the digital age, but we draw the line at allowing governmental entities to take charge of these important notices without any independent oversight whatsoever. That’s exactly why the public notice law was passed in the first place.

Upon a legislator’s request, the New Jersey Press Association (of which I am on the board) worked for a year and four months to draft a bill to make legal notices easier, fairer to government and private entities and with better digital accessibility. It would allow for publications (print or digital) that meet certain criteria to qualify as legal newspapers as long as they can prove that they have a valid subscription base, that they produce at least a percentage of their own content and that they have been in operation in the state for at least two years. It also modernizes the pricing structure to per-character and agrees that all legal notices published will also be disseminated at no additional charge on the already existing, searchable press association site.

This, to us, is a win-win-win — for you, the public; for government and for us the newspapers.

That proposed bill has been sitting with the legislature for months, without a sponsor.

The Star-Ledger’s decision to cease printing of its and several of its sister publications has hit the fast-forward button on a process to allow for a digital option in addition to print — something we favor, but done the right way, not buried across hundreds of government websites, with solutions for the private citizenry who must publish notices and not exclusively in the hands of the government with no oversight.

The idea that government entities should be allowed to publish notices on their own websites is absurd. There will be no way to tell when they publish them or if they met the time requirements — and when they fail to, the only way to hold them accountable will be to sue them. We can see this happening with every project that goes out for bid, and a single lawsuit will cost the taxpayers more money than five years’ worth of legal notices ever will. We would also argue that most government websites are so user unfriendly, we’ll be lucky to find the notices. And besides, who is sitting around reading government websites? People come to news sites to read every day, and I’d put our stats up against any government site.

You are going to hear a lot of arguments about money as this unfolds — but our argument remains what it has been for over a decade — transparency. As a legal newspaper, we get the budgets, the ordinances, the planning board notices, meeting notices, and more; in a timely, legally prescribed fashion — before they are voted on by a governing body. We share them with you, the public, through your normal course of reading both in print and online. This gives us all time to ask questions, do research and be prepared for hearings to come. It prevents elected officials from sneaking big expenditures, contract awards and new laws through the process without independent sets of eyes on it.

I will be transparent with you here — we do rely on the legal notices for revenue. It helps us pay for skyrocketing printing costs and employ a staff of journalists and editors. While legal notices account for a tiny drop in the bucket of government budgets, for us, they pay the bills and give us the opportunity to continue to deliver the same level of fair and balanced news coverage that you have come to expect. Serving as the legal papers to seven municipalities, the County of Union and a smattering of boards of education, the average cost for is less than $10,000 per year for each of them to us.

The cost of publishing these notices has not changed since 1983, and we’re proposing starting with those same prices in this bill — any politician that wants to make this about saving money or reducing your property taxes is lying to your face.

Without that revenue, we don’t know what the future will hold for us to remain in print every week. And we also know that many of the other award-winning independent publications across our state will face the same, if not worse, financial hardship that ours will. It could be the final nail in the coffin of local professional journalism for New Jersey — an industry that none of us got into to get rich, but because it is what we believe in so strongly.

Unlike what we heard from one politician about the government underwriting newspapers, it isn’t about that; it’s spending a very small amount of money on government transparency to ensure that those politicians steward our tax dollars appropriately and don’t pass laws that inhibit rights without the say of the public.

So please, contact Senate President Nicholas Scutari, (908) 587-0404, senscutari@njleg.org, and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin, (732) 855-7441, asmcoughlin@njleg.org, and ask them to sponsor the NJPA’s bill. Don’t let the lights go out on both government operations and the press.

Lauren S. Barr
Publisher