Eliminating newspaper notices weakens citizens’ engagement with government

A joint research project by three major universities shows that newspapers are highly effective disseminators of public notices, and moving the notices to government websites weakens citizen engagement with local governments.

“The study says exactly what the Texas Press Association has been telling lawmakers for decades: notices in newspapers actually get noticed,” said Mike Hodges, executive director of TPA. “Moving notices to government websites hurts public awareness and involvement. That is good only for officials who want to push something through with minimal opposition.”

The study was conducted by Kimberlyn Munevara of Texas A&M University, Anya Nakhmurinab of the Yale School of Management and Delphine Samuels of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. The following is their abstract of the project.

Abstract

This paper studies the role of newspaper notices — legally required announcements published in print and online news outlets to inform citizens about local government activities — in facilitating citizen engagement. We examine Florida’s House Bill 7049, the first statewide law to revoke the requirement that public notices appear in newspapers and to allow local governments to publish notices on county-operated websites instead. Exploiting cross-county variation in the availability of these websites, we find that local governments with access to a county public notice website significantly reduce their newspaper notices after the reform, particularly for notices that typically prompt citizen involvement, such as public hearings and planning and zoning proposals. 

By contrast, we observe no discernible increase in traffic of county public notice websites, suggesting limited citizen substitution to the new dissemination channel. Consistent with reduced citizen awareness, public meetings in affected cities experience a decline in participation. We also find an increase in the number of commercial zoning permits, consistent with reduced activism against new construction. Taken together, our findings suggest that removing newspaper publication requirements reduces the visibility of public notices and, in turn, weakens citizen engagement in local governance.

The full study is available here.