• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, April 17, 2025

Newspapers are being squeezed from every angle, and many are losing critical revenue from public notices.  

That’s especially true in Alaska, where the income from public notices totals $2 million a year and is one of the largest advertising streams for some newspapers. 

Publishers are reducing their print runs, cutting off a key channel for public notices. 

A solution has presented itself: The Alaska News Coalition is creating the Alaska Public Notices website. Once launched, the website will “in theory give you every public notice a newspaper uploads to the site,” says Larry Persily, board chair of the coalition.

The work will be done on a volunteer basis.   

Participating newspapers can upload public notices themselves for free, or they can pay a nominal fee to have it done for them. 

The site will take everything from delinquent properties tax notices to advertisements of upcoming public meetings and project bids. 

This is not a new idea. The Alaska clearinghouse is modeled on Public Notice Illinois, a site launched in 2008 by the Illinois Press Association. Indeed, the Illinois Press Association will host the Alaska site for a fee of roughly $3,000 per year. The upfront cost to create it was $3,000.

“It’s a low-cost gamble, Persily says.  

This might have legs elsewhere. States throughout the country have passed laws to move public notices to government websites and that includes Alaska. In March 2024, Alaska unanimously passed Senate Bill 68, which removes the legal requirement that public notices related to the sale and removal of water be placed in local newspapers.  

Persily clarifies that municipalities can still require notices to be posted in newspapers, but adds that these will then be uploaded to the website. 

Readers can conduct searches for free. But they can pay a yearly fee to receive alerts every time a keyword pops up in a posted notice.