Print keeps government open
Misguided lawmakers are back with bills to allow local government to stop printing notices.
When the Virginia Coalition for Open Government recently reviewed local government websites, it found that far too many of them hide their budget. Some localities cried foul over their poor grades, but the fact was that one of their most important public documents was not easy to find.
What, then, could possibly make lawmakers like Del. Chris Head, R-Botetourt County, think local governments would do any better with publishing public notices online?
January 23, 2013 - 6:27 AM
This editorial is pure BS. Localities publish notices in one Newspaper of Record on one day. If you don’t get that paper you have to go someplace such as a library to read it. It goes into hard-to-find spots in a few days. A continuing increase in access to the internet has reached the level today that virtually everyone can view these notices and they don’t have to remember the date of publication or the publication. The proposed budgets and other documents should stay on the web site for a long time, making it much more convenient. It is dishonest to say that anyone without internet at home or the library has ever or will ever consult these budgets.
I think that the saturation of the internet matters and it is true that a wide swath of people are missed if a notice is solely in print or solely online. But just as guns do not ensure freedom and liberty, neither does public notice printed in a newspaper ensure open government.
IMO, newspapers made their beds by not doing more all along to shine sunshine where it was needed to complain about any instance it misses now. Those tiny little “public notices” are not a substitute for anyone’s due diligence.
Newspapers have long been a bastion of transparency, and I agree that the more people who know the business of government the better. However, with declining subscribers and dwindling revenue from retail advertisers, I wonder if this editorial is a desperate attempt to hold onto one last revenue source – the income guaranteed by state sunshine laws, and paid for by local tax revenue. Be honest, and tell the public how much profit your newspaper makes annually from mandated public notices funded by taxpayer dollars.
Newspapers have long been a bastion of transparency….
When Hearst Artist Frederic Remington, cabled from Cuba in 1897 that “there will be no war,” William Randolph Hearst cabled back: “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”