Keep legal notices in papers

A bill sponsored by Sen. Steve Urquhart, R-St. George, would remove legal notices from newspapers and put them on a state-run Web site instead. While you might expect a newspaper to oppose this idea because of the potential revenue loss, the truth is this bill is a loser for everyone in the state.

The bill is not unique. It is riding a slowly growing trend nationwide based on the false premise that newspaper readership is disappearing and the printed word is becoming irrelevant. It is true that many newspapers are in financial trouble, but that is a consequence of a decline in advertising due to the recession and the growth of the Internet. It is not, especially in Utah, a consequence of a loss of readership.

In fact, this newspaper has a growing print circulation and attracts well over 1 million individual readers to its Web site every month — a figure that continues to rise. We would venture that state government Web sites don't attract nearly as many visitors, nor are they as easy to navigate. Putting legal notices on a government Web site would serve only to hide them from the public amid the vast information tonnage floating through cyberspace.

But there are more fundamental reasons why it would be wrong to move legal notices from general-circulation newspapers and onto an obscure state Web site. Those sites would not be independent of the government. They would instead be part of it and therefore subject to political pressures. The public is far better served when an independent third party, newspapers, acts as a bridge of information between the state and the people.

In addition, as any Web surfer can attest, Web sites are not dependable. They are subject to technical issues, and they don't make a reliable and enduring archivable record the way newspapers do.

The bill claims it would cost the state nothing. However, Web sites require considerable maintenance and personnel. Even if this new site were to fall under existing state government Web services, it still would cost taxpayers. Newspapers, on the other hand, store and archive data for nothing other than the cost of a legal notice.

Most importantly, however, newspapers in Utah have been working for two years with state lawmakers to develop a central Web site, searchable by key word, that would provide this information to the public. The site would be accessible to the millions of online readers of Utah newspapers. But keeping the information available to the many print readers, including those who do not use the Internet, is vital, as well. The people of Utah have nothing to gain from SB208.