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Newspapers Vs. Spuds: 'Fuddy-Duddy' Study In Maine

Ok, Maine's newspaper industry may well bring in almost as much revenue as the state's long-haled potato crop, according to research touted by the Maine Press Association, but it's a "fuddy-duddy" study," writes Al Diamon.  "Those are impressive numbers, although I suspect they'd be less so if compared to, say, the Maine fast-food industry or the state's combined convenience-store purchases or the amount of liquor sales Maine loses to New Hampshire every year," says the "Maine Media" columnist.

To put the study in perspective, Diamon notes that Maine's newspaper industry is currently fighting two pieces of proposed legislation - one would reduce how many legal notices the state and local governments are required to run in newspapers by allowing certain ones to be posted online, the other " would let cities and towns use cheaper free papers for legal notices, rather than more expensive papers with second-class postage licenses."

Diamon does applaud the state's papers for finally owning up to the fact that their fight is about retaining revenues from the legal notices.  In past years, he writes, the papers had argued that their cause "was all about transparency in government and the public's right to know."

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1 comment about "Newspapers Vs. Spuds: 'Fuddy-Duddy' Study In Maine".
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  1. Mark Moskow from FredMark, May 6, 2011 at 2:11 p.m.

    Our local governments are broke. In a perfect world we would publish notices on radio because there is an underserved part of the community that can not read. But that would be as ridiculously expensive as publishing them in newspapers. We have to make choices based on cost. Luckily there is a solution that provides for lower cost (around $2K for the entire year) and for third party independence which the newspapers are looking for. Look at this site http://tinyurl.com/4gw4dfw .

    It is FREE-You don’t have to subscribe to a newspaper to receive the notices THE NOTICES COME TO YOU-. No more hunting for notices in the back of the newspaper. They e-mail alerts based on preference of both type of notice and locality. (“Please e-mail me whenever there is a zoning hearing in Camden".

    Set it up once and forget it. -IMMEDIATE-The local government doesn’t have to wait for the notice to be published in the newspaper for it to be published on line. The government employees can upload it straight to the site.

    -BETTER DISCLOSURE-They link to the original documents (zoning maps, bid specifications, providing way more information than a notice in print. In addition, they map to the localities-DOCUMENTATION- they provide affidavits of publishing. -GREEN- No cutting down trees to publish these notices. -PERMANENCE- The notices stay on line forever. In newspapers, they are published in a few editions and then are gone. COST SAVINGS- The local governments will save 90% of what they spend in notices. The newspaper’s publish the notices for only a few weeks.This issue is playing out all over the country. Read legal-notice.org/blog . Newspapers do a lot of things really well. But so do a lot of businesses. It doesn’t mean as taxpayers we should overspend for a service that is now inferior.

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