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In 2021, the Argus Leader, South Dakota’s biggest newspaper by circulation, stopped printing in-state. “That was very sad,” remembered Joe Sneve, who for more than a decade was a reporter at the Leader, which he called “the mothership.” Sneve, now forty-one, covers state politics; his family dates back five generations in Sioux Falls, where a city street shares his last name. The decision to go out-of-state was made by Gannett, the Leader’s parent company, which had been giving, Sneve told me, various directives to Leader staffers about how to do their jobs. “If we work hard and do it, they’ll quit laying off our friends,” he remembered thinking. But finally, he and a colleague, Jonathan Ellis, decided the writing was on the wall. “If we wanted to stay in journalism,” Sneve said, “we were going to have to make our own vessel.” The result was The Dakota Scout, a five-dollars-per-month news site with a free weekly paper companion.
Sneve and Ellis constructed their life raft, as Sneve called it, about thirty days after quitting their jobs at the Leader. It was a sleepless month of sorting out logistics, and when the city clerk asked them offhandedly if The Dakota Scout might want to become a “paper of record” for the area, they hadn’t considered it as a possibility. The Argus Leader was the long-established paper of record, and besides, in South Dakota an outlet had to be in business for a year in order to be eligible. You also had to sell a print newspaper—a free one wouldn’t do. “I thought, ‘Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’” Sneve said.
“Newspaper of record” is a term one might vaguely associate with a prominent national outlet, but the designation has actual bureaucratic and practical meaning. If you run a newspaper of record, you have a relationship with your local government, which pays you to print its public and legal notices in your pages. The notices—those tiny-fonted announcements usually bulking the second half of a local paper with words like “probate,” “lien,” and “bids”—are an old, sometimes stultifying, necessity. “For three hundred years, we’ve had laws that say you’ve got to notify the public about thirty or so different things: foreclosures, government bonds, budgets, meetings, all this stuff,” Jake Seaton—who founded Column, a software company that helps publishers place public notices on behalf of local governments across the country—told me.
The idea of public notice is ancient: Acta Diurna (“Daily Acts”) were carved daily in Roman times, announcing government decrees alongside marriages and deaths, among other immortal tidbits. Later, in the Middle Ages, the town crier was a kind of inexhaustible public notice-yeller. In 1665, Britain’s oldest paper, the Oxford Gazette (later the London Gazette), became the official place to run public notices from the court, and eventually from municipalities beyond, printed in infinitesimal seven-point type. In the United States, “cruder forms” of public notice sprouted (per a 1941 master’s thesis on the topic), in the form of public punishments of criminals; by 1871, legal notices were running in the New York Herald. States experimented with airing public notices on the radio and over the telephone, but newspapers—independent, widely circulating, locally oriented—were, in their heyday, the place to be.
Today, a number of municipalities in the US have multiple papers where they place their notices—the idea is to spread information as widely as possible. But in Sioux Falls and elsewhere, there might be just one official paper—an effect of the paucity of local news options and the limits of a government’s budget. Some counties do not have a newspaper of record at all. In those cases, a paper in a neighboring county might get the public notice business from down the road—legally, the information must go somewhere nearby. Seaton, whose family has owned a chain of local papers in Kansas and across the Midwest for five generations, told me that his favorite category is the “noxious weeds notice,” wherein a noxious-weed department (common in agricultural states; there is a Weed Commissioner in every county in Iowa) posts a public notice in the newspaper that says “Dear so-and-so, you need to mow your lawn.” Recently, in Texas, I found notice of two unclaimed goats on Caldwell County’s Soda Springs Road. In Moore, Oklahoma, a red go-kart would soon be sold. Back in Sioux Falls, the city asked for bids on the “Odor Control Program for Sanitary Sewer Collection System.” Then there are the public notices that Sneve described as “sad”: “Somebody’s child has been taken into custody,” for instance, or someone is changing their name after a divorce. It is in public notices, he said, that “you can tell sometimes that there are folks out in the community that need a little more help.” Stories big and small lurk.
Over the years, an organization called the Public Notice Resource Center has put a great deal of energy toward defining why, exactly, public notices must appear in newspapers and not simply on government websites: there is a three-legged stool, I was told, of government transparency. The stool’s legs are: open meetings, the Freedom of Information Act, and public notices. Take one away, and the stool falls over. Brad Thompson, the president of the Public Notice Resource Center and of the Detroit Legal News, told me that “a number of years ago, we were dealing with a local municipal government association of some sort or another, who said, ‘Well, we just want to put all the notices on our website and take them out of the newspapers. It’ll save everybody a lot of money.’” To Thompson, this was an “erroneous argument.” Public notice is a service that a local paper provides to a government, as he put it. You don’t get it for free—just as General Motors, in his words, wouldn’t simply give away a fire truck because a municipality needed one.
Recently, however, a growing number of public notice contracts between local papers and governments have shifted or even been canceled. Nearly everywhere in the country, a state’s press association has started up a website that collects and displays public notices. In Texas, notices about vehicles towed to a storage facility can now be published on a third-party website, and not just in a newspaper of record. In 2023, Louisiana became the first state to move toward all-digital public notices. The same year, Florida became the first to move public notices away from news outlets and press associations altogether. One local paper there, Clay Today, noted that the sponsor of the bill, Representative Randy Fine, proposed the legislation months after an editorial critical of him appeared in Florida Today (“Rep. Randy Fine’s bullying of local leaders is bad for Brevard County”). Today, public notices in Florida appear on sixty-seven separate county websites, and not automatically on a centralized site run by the press association; a Republican state senator observed that this seemed like a good way to hide important public information.
To many, the public notice is a symbol of government transparency in a time of two interlinked realities: newspapers are struggling, and public records offices are being shuttered. As Gunita Singh, an attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told me, “We need to build a culture of greater transparency across the government—state and federal.” Besides, there are still swaths of the country that don’t have reliable internet access—which means news outlets still play a critical role in community engagement with government. For a journalist such as Sneve, that’s motivation enough.
There is no one reason why the changes to the business of public notice are occurring; it varies from place to place, and when local politics are involved, which is often, it is not always an easy guess where lines are drawn. In San Francisco, Dean Preston, the city supervisor, proposed canceling a public notice contract with the Marina Times, which he compared to Breitbart, noting a tweet by its editor about Preston’s children. (“Hope he doesn’t let them out at night by themselves after he gets rid of the entire SFPD and abolishes prisons.”) The Colorado News Collaborative reported on a “brewing newspaper of record war” between the Weekly Register-Call, the oldest weekly in Colorado, and Gilpin County, which diverted its public notices (and some twenty-four thousand dollars in fees) to a paper called the Mountain-Ear, recently purchased by Christian Vanek, the founder of SurveyGizmo. (The county had previously paid both papers to place its public notices, until county commissioners accused the Weekly Register-Call of mishandling some of the public notices—failing to publish them or sometimes publishing them with typos. The editor of the Register-Call characterized the situation to the CNC as “political”; his paper is “conservative.”) In New Jersey, the sudden closure of the Star-Ledger left many communities stranded without a legal place to publish their public notices, leading to a proposal by Nicholas Scutari, a Democratic state senator, to publish public notices on a state website: they had to go somewhere.
This latter example dovetails with a larger pattern among municipalities wanting to build their own websites on which public notices might go. It is not simply a matter of “newspapers vs. the internet,” the Public Notice Resource Center says, but one of “newspapers and newspaper websites vs. government websites.” Legislative battles undergird that shift. In Florida, as the state senate considered allowing local governments to place public notices on county-run sites, Jim Fogler, who was then the CEO of the Florida Press Association, wrote in an op-ed, “Government website-only notice will push government actions further into the shadows and make it less transparent. And it will make it harder for Floridians to monitor their local government and hold their leaders accountable.” In Alaska, the state senate advanced a bill that would allow the Department of Natural Resources and the Department of Environmental Conservation to no longer place water-related public notices in local papers. The editorial board of the Anchorage Daily News likened this to putting “the government fox in charge of posting the times he plans to visit the hen house.” Language of this kind recurs among local news defenders.
Seaton, of Column, had a different take: “I think it makes a lot of sense that policymakers want innovation here, and want to pass a framework that reflects modern societies. But I do believe that media companies that historically provided the service need to be involved and need to be stakeholders in that process.” That’s in no small part because public notices, like so few other things these days, are still profitable to local outlets—though, as Thompson told me, “nobody’s gouging on this.” The Detroit Legal News, he noted, lowered its price on notices during the city’s bankruptcy, in 2013. There, Thompson said, at least a dozen newspapers would qualify as papers of record; the City of Detroit might place notices not just with him, but also in a “minority newspaper, just to spread the notice more broadly.” His office handles virtually all of the foreclosures in Michigan, he said, and its services include not only publication, but contracting with a sheriff’s office to get someone to affix the notices to properties. In some cases, the Detroit Legal News has had to get to a foreclosing property by boat.
Real estate investors read public notices; so do construction companies and lawyers and people scouring for news of self-storage auctions and realtors and, as Seaton put it, “not-in-my-backyard types.” Add to that anyone who simply wants the barest bones of local information. In the case of Detroit’s bankruptcy, Thompson said, “there was all sorts of, you know, How do we get good information about what the city’s doing?” Listening to a local radio show on the way to work one morning, Thompson heard a caller-in ask a version of this question: How do we really see what’s going on with the City of Detroit, what they’re spending money on? Another caller popped on: You’ve got to read the Detroit Legal News, because the city council proceedings are published. “I almost crashed my car,” Thompson told me.
“In theory, those notices that run in local papers pay for reporters that then read those notices and then turn around and write stories about those notices to further inform the public that the city, a company, government, whoever is doing something that’s going to affect your life or liberty,” Mark Thomas, the executive vice president of the Oklahoma Press Association, told me. “That’s kind of the circular thought process that has been from the founding of this country about how it happens that way.” Consider Garret Ellison, a reporter from Michigan who, combing public notices, found mention of a proposal from Nestlé Waters North America, which was applying to pump groundwater from a local well at an increase of 167 percent—startling news to local activists and community members. The notice was tucked away on a government website, where for forty-one days it received no response—despite being posted explicitly for the purpose of public comment. The government website, called the DEQ Environmental Calendar, was part of a hard-to-navigate, sometimes broken set of databases—and, as Ellison wrote for MLive, Michigan’s largest local news site, “is not widely read by the general public.”
Ellison’s article was published in 2016. Since then, how many stories in the public interest have been missed? Recently, in Tennessee, public notice of any kind, anywhere, didn’t seem to be a requirement when Elon Musk’s Boring Company received permission and a literally free pass from the City of Nashville to start drilling a tunnel that will thread electric cars between the downtown and the airport. The state allowed the company to begin work before any announcement of the idea was made public, and only posted notice three days before a special meeting officially signed off on it. “I think they know that this project is unpopular. They know that it is something that the people do not want, so they have to operate with secrecy,” Representative Justin Jones told the Nashville Banner. “I mean, when you announce a public-private partnership behind a locked door with armed police officers, that should trouble us all.”
“Fundamentally, I don’t trust government,” Joe Sneve told me from South Dakota. Since starting The Dakota Scout, he’d been following the trail of questions around why public notices had to go in a newspaper and not on a county-run or state site. “On the surface, this makes sense,” he said. And yet: “I do not put it past human beings with political pressures facing them or whatever to go back and alter digital documents.” Sneve holds a romantic belief in print. He also came to understand, from looking into whether or not The Dakota Scout might print public notices in Sioux Falls, that the business of public notices in town was no longer very local. “It was done in some central office,” he said, of Gannett placing them in the Argus Leader.
There’s a lot of driving in South Dakota, particularly when you report, as Sneve does, on the capital in Pierre, which is three and a half hours by car west from Sioux Falls. “Spareness everywhere,” he said. He does a good deal of thinking on the road. On one trek, he thought about the clerk’s suggestion that The Dakota Scout pursue paper-of-record designation. He sensed an opening. The trouble was the requirements, particularly the one about charging readers for access to public notice information, which seemed “counterintuitive,” he told me. “If the idea is to notify the public, charging money strikes me as a barrier to information. If I don’t have a dollar for the paper, I still want to know what my government is doing.” On the long drive, Sneve wondered: “Why can’t we change the law?” When it came to public notices, everyone else seemed to be doing it.
It would take lobbyists and two legislative sessions to get the law changed, and for the South Dakota Newspaper Association to get on board with The Dakota Scout’s interest in printing public notices in the first place, as a free paper. “The legislature told the newspaper industry, ‘You’ve got a year to figure this out,’” Sneve remembered. “A couple said there’s merit to what these guys are trying to do.” But the environment for local news in the region was shifting. The association would soon change its name—to the South Dakota NewsMedia Association—as well as its bylaws, opening membership to more outlets, including The Dakota Scout.
Getting the backing of the newspaper industry opened the door for the law to be amended, so that, potentially, The Dakota Scout could become the paper of record for Sioux Falls. But once the law was officially changed, “it became time to get the city government to pick us and drop the Argus Leader,” Sneve said. “Since this whole thing started, the whole council had turned over. The city clerk who said ‘Have you ever thought about being the paper of record?’—he didn’t work there anymore. There was no appetite.” Sneve began a series of lunches and meetings with the city council and the mayor, repeating versions of the same message: “We’re local; the money stays in Sioux Falls; if you have issues with billing or need something edited, we’re a block away. It’s hard to get ahold of people up that phone tree at Gannett.”
As the South Dakota Searchlight, a nonprofit affiliate of States Newsroom, later reported, even that was still the beginning of the battle over Sioux Falls’ public notices. Once the city government ultimately voted to give newspaper-of-record designation to The Dakota Scout, the Argus Leader fought back. “Gannett has few journalists, but plenty of lawyers,” the Searchlight reported, and in July of 2024 the company took the city to court, arguing that The Dakota Scout had not filed certain paperwork on deadline. (“That seems reasonable since the new law didn’t go into effect until July 1 and had yet to be discussed in the Legislature prior to Jan. 1,” per the Searchlight. “It would take equal amounts of clairvoyance and hubris for The Dakota Scout to file ownership paperwork for a law that did not yet exist.”)
Gannett eventually dropped the suit, and The Dakota Scout enjoyed its new paper-of-record status. The Sioux Falls School District began to send over its notices, followed by the City of Baltic, Minnehaha County, Lincoln County, and the Harrisburg School District. (“Readers trust the Argus Leader for news and important information, including public notices. We believe the Argus Leader is the premier source for these advertisements and that it’s a detriment to the community not to publish in our established newspaper,” an Argus Leader spokesperson told me, via Gannett.) Sneve emphasized to me that all the reporters on the ground, regardless of their institutional affiliation, had the same goal: to “shine a light on stuff happening in the community.”
The Argus Leader had made around 35,000 dollars in 2023, and around 22,300 dollars in the first half of 2024 from being the Sioux Falls paper of record: no small sum. For a startup such as The Dakota Scout, which has a staff of sixteen—four of them full-time—public notices could prove critical to the bottom line. And “whereas print advertising revenue has declined precipitously with competition from online advertising solutions,” Seaton told me, “the requirement to publish notices in print has remained the same.” Given that, “the proportion of each newspaper’s business that public notice represents has risen significantly.” In other words: there is the matter of government transparency, but there is also the matter of financial security, both for longtime papers and for small, upstart outlets that can prove to their local government that they are serious, local, and independent (if the local government, in fact, wants this).
Even so, Sneve told me that The Dakota Scout had “been careful not to build the viability of our company around” public notices. “It’s icing on the cake.” They’d had to hire someone, a farmer and historian, whose full-time job it became to edit, format, and print public notices, corresponding with all the necessary people: clerks, notaries, lawyers. Every week has been different. “Some weeks it makes fifty bucks,” Sneve said. “Other weeks it makes three thousand. You can’t really project what it’s going to be. It depends on how ambitious the governments are. If they’re not proposing ordinances, there’s not a lot of revenue. We can’t really forecast it. It’s a little unnerving, a bit. But it’s repeat revenue.”
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