With classified and several key categories having already largely decamped for digital, newspapers are now battling to hold onto one of their oldest and most reliable forms of advertising: Public notices.
These government ads, which inform citizens of everything from notices of public budgets to public hearings and government contracts available for bidding, have been one of the backbones of newspaper advertising virtually since the industry’s inception.
“I’m sure when they built the Canadian Pacific Railway they were putting notices in newspapers,” said Newspapers Canada president and CEO John Hinds. “They play an important role in the role of the newspaper in civic life. Yes there’s a revenue component, but it’s also newspapers playing that connective role between citizens and their governments.”
Phillip Crawley, publisher and CEO of The Globe and Mail, said these notices contribute approximately $2 million in annual revenue for the national daily. “They’re not pretty to look at, but they’re important pieces of information, and from our point of view it’s obviously a good source of revenue,” he said. “It’s not a big chunk of business, but $2 million is not to be sniffed at.”
In response to what it describes as “a push to move public notices into an online only format,” Newspapers Canada recently issued an information sheet titled “Newspapers work for public notices.”
It warns against moving public notices online and abolishing legal requirements to publish notices in newspapers. It cites 2012 research conducted by Totum Research, which found that 59% of Canadians believe that printed newspapers are the most appropriate advertising medium for information about regional and municipal government programs and services.
The association said the trend of various levels of government attempting to use only their own websites and social media to reach constituents is “a concern” for several reasons:
- More than a quarter of Canadians don’t use social media;
- Governments have an obligation to provide access to important and relevant information to all Canadians;
- Few municipalities are adequately served by online-only news and information sources;
- Website information can be changed, while printed public notices are archived and remain as a permanent pubic record
As with most moves from traditional to digital media, cost reduction is the most cited reason for adopting an online-only format. But Newspapers Canada, which represents approximately 830 publications across Canada, called this a “false savings” that comes at the cost of public awareness.
“Online public notices can only be effective if the public knows where to look and is willing to take time out of their day to go searching for them,” said the organization.
The association said because 75% of Canadians read their local newspaper, the likelihood is “far greater” that a public notice’s intended target will discover the information in a newspaper.
Hinds said the current initiative is in response to Alberta legislation proposing municipalities be allowed to use other media to distribute information to residents, but acknowledged the phenomenon is not yet widespread in Canada.
“We haven’t seen it in Canada, but we’ve seen it in some of the U.S. states, where they have allowed notices to go completely online,” he said. “I don’t think it will happen in Canada – I think there’s a notion of keeping notices in the public sphere.”
However, he said it is important for the industry association to stay ahead of the trend as newspapers battle to hold onto advertising sources. “We have to be vigilant,” he said. “We do find examples, infrequently but every once in a while, of institutions that do decide they can do it better themselves and put it on their website.”
Hinds said the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, for example, changed its regulations to no longer run public notices in newspapers, a provision that was clandestinely inserted into an omnibus bill a couple of years ago, he said. “That was a concern to us,” he said.
While Hinds declined to provide a dollar value for public notices, he called it a “big category” for newspapers.
In a 2010 report titled Public Policy and Funding the News, Geoffrey Cowan and David Westphal of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s Center on Communication and Leadership and Policy, said public notices provide “hundreds of millions” in revenue for U.S. newspapers each year.
“Cash-strapped government agencies are asking courts and legislative bodies to allow them to make the switch to the internet,” said the report. “Legislation to allow a transition to the internet has been introduced in at least 40 states, and in some the switch to the web is underway.”
The first thing visitors to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) website encounter is a big blue box containing the message “When public notices reach the public, everyone benefits.”
In 2000, the NAA estimated that public notices contributed between 5-10% of overall revenue. Today, several U.S. states including Pennsylvania, Florida and Colorado have partnered with newspaper publishers throughout the state to aggregate public notices in searchable online databases.
Newspapers in Michigan, meanwhile, are currently fighting a bill that would require public notices to be published exclusively online and allow TV and radio stations to compete for the business.
Crawley, meanwhile, said it is just as important for the Globe to retain its birth, death and marriage notices, which contribute roughly double the amount of revenue provided by public notices.
“I always say you can judge a paper’s health by looking at its births, marriages and deaths,” he said. “If you go to a community where the local paper has next to no announcements of that kind, you know it’s lost its place in the community. People really look to that as a source of what’s going on around them.”
