Official journal law two-edged sword for papers

There’s another argument increasingly relevant in the longtime practice of state and local governments paying for public notices in an official journal: the economic leverage governments can use against newspapers, as exemplified by recent choices in Caddo Parish.

Last month, all of the major government in the parish – the parish, school district, sheriff’s office, and Shreveport – threw their public notice business to the Shreveport Times. That had to be a lifeline to the Times, which has been in steep decline in readership since the turn of the century, prints just a few pages per edition now (and misses a day a week in print), and has hardly any local staff and hard news coverage.

That turn for the worse accelerated when the privately-owned Georges Media Group planted an affiliate in the area, eating more into the Times’ revenues. The incoming largesse from government will boost its bottom line, although it has backup by being part of the USA Today Gannett Network, owned by a private equity firm.

But it was the death knell to at least one of the two weekly newspapers in the parish, the Caddo Citizen, which ceased publication earlier this month, which used to have some of that business. The same applies to the Shreveport Sun, which has not announced an official demise while it is unclear whether it will continue to publish. Both were locally owned.

As newspapers nationwide have shed their numbers enormously over the past two decades – all of revenues, employees, and readers – and disproportionately among the smaller, increasingly local governments gain leverage over their coverage through statutory requirements that certain government actions appear in a newspaper. As revenues decline, as these have for almost every single newspaper in America over the past twenty years, these annual contracts become an increasingly larger piece of the revenue pie for the winners.

And the fact that having one of these plums could be the difference between life and death does make a difference, especially as Louisiana law has changed to grant greater latitude to governments in official journal choices in response to declining options. Some north Louisiana examples illustrate the pressure on newspapers this enforced relationship can generate.

The official journal for Bossier Parish governments is the Bossier Press-Tribune, but it runs little local news that isn’t a news release. And over the past decade, it has run almost no opinion columns about local government; prior to that, for a number of years it did have a local columnist who churned out opinion pieces but which were little more than hagiography extolling the presumed virtues of Bossier governments (in fact, lauding Bossier City’s building spree that ran up debt faster than the federal government, robbing its citizens of a chance for their city to become a low-tax, high-economic-growth haven).

Also, in 2018, I began writing for the official journal of Webster Parish governments, the Minden Press-Herald. But I began calling them as I saw them featuring the agonistes of local governments with criticisms of elected officials and within a few months was told I “wasn’t a good fit” for the gig. (Not for the first time: I wrote opinions for the Times in 1997-98 and was abruptly dismissed after being warned my critiques were upsetting some local politicians, although I don’t know if it was the official journal for local governments back then.)

Some publishers don’t scare like that, one such being a passionate defender of the public notice function of newspapers, Hanna Publications’ Sam Hanna, Jr. whose three newspapers each serve as official journals of the parishes they are in, and for which I write. One, the Ouachita Citizen, also has picked up notices from the parish school district, sheriff’s office, and West Monroe.

But from time to time, I have written about, and critically, West Monroe city government. (And in the past year I have written on several occasions about the questionable policy-making approach of the majority on the Monroe City Council and of the Monroe City School Board, but neither contract with the Citizen.) I’ve never been told I should lay off these kinds of critiques, but as pressures continue to mount on newspapers, how many other publishers are going to display that kind of stern stuff?

There had been a growing movement among governments to abolish official journals and thus save taxpayers money by publishing notices online. But that tide might reverse if elected officials begin to press the issue of leverage over local coverage, which then potentially leaves newspapers with the Hobson’s choice of accepting a Faustian bargain or circling the drain.