Legislative alert: What comes next with HB33 changes to municipal public notices

Editor's note: See the article below Monica's column for a confidential summary of local government public notice changes in HB33.

Last week, Ohio public notice law changes that were included in House Bill 33 took effect. One of the biggest changes appears to be a shift by the government in placing a burden on citizens to actively have to find the notices in order to be “noticed.”

Public notices have historically been published in a newspaper of general circulation in the classified section of the newspaper or as a display ad. While it is unknown how many citizens read those notices on a regular basis, they do know where to find them.

House Bill 33 has several notice provisions, some of which are minor changes that we did not weigh in on (such as changing a dollar threshold for something to require a bid) and several others that we did object to – such as the EPA variance hearings and ODOT bids – but were enacted regardless.

The change in municipal notices was inserted in the budget bill at the last minute without notice or warning just before the bill was voted on. We registered objections to this last minute change but the budget bill went through without this item being amended or vetoed.

We are still engaged in active conversation with the Ohio Municipal League about some aspects of the statute that we would like to see revised. Because the municipal notice change was included in the budget bill for the entire state, it is not realistic to expect the legislature to repeal this entire bill. Instead, we are working to have this issue addressed separately.

The ONMA board is being updated in detail about this topic but it would be ill-advised for me to send out lobbying strategy in a mass-circulated email. If confidential lobbying information on this issue were to be shared with non-members or published then our continuing work to get this statute revised would be seriously harmed.

The notices affected in HB33 under Ohio R.C. 731.21 is a narrow category of municipal notices. As far as we can determine, municipal bids are not included. Several papers ran editorials that suggested otherwise and we are not sure where that information originated.

I have had several members ask me what they can do. We have regularly shared the following “best practices” on public notices with our members in recent years and again urge our members to follow them. Doing so would be helpful on both this specific issue and the overall future of public notices in our state:

• Make sure someone at your paper has a customer service relationship with your local officials that goes beyond the “news source-journalist” relationship. Your local officials need to understand the value of your audience. Someone on your sales staff who is practiced at explaining this to clients and prospects would probably be the best person to reach out on an occasional basis and ask “ How did that ad work for you? Did you get response?”
  
  
• Make sure someone at your paper, ideally an editor or publisher, has a relationship with the statehouse officials whose districts are in your newspaper market. Our lobbyists can facilitate a meeting for you either in your district or in Columbus if you need an introduction.
  
  
• If the topic of notices comes up, stress the importance of your audience both in print and digital. You have a large swath of the community coming to your website daily looking for local news. This assists the government in meeting people where they already are looking for information about the local community. On the flip side, people rarely go to your community’s municipal website unless they have a specific reason to do so. Local citizens shouldn’t have the burden of trying to figure out when or if a notice has been posted and on which website or social media platform. In addition, some social media platforms are used by very specific demographics – which means citizens who aren’t part of that demographic likely don’t use that platform and won’t see the notice if it is placed there.
  
  Our experience is that revenue-based arguments in support of retaining public notices, or anything approaching that, does not work with either local government officials or legislators. If your paper relies heavily on notice revenue, we strongly suggest you think of ways to make sure your paper and digital offerings are still attractive options for your government advertisers even if the notice is no longer “required”. I know of a situation two weeks ago where a government advertiser chose a paper’s e-edition over their own website for a notice that was not required to be in print.
  
  
• If you have a government advertiser who seems to understand that your website generates more traffic than theirs and they seem interested in pursuing a digital option for a notice that isn’t required to be published in print, by all means do whatever you can to assist them. Each of our members has different digital solutions they offer – put together a few options for your advertiser to choose from just like you would any other advertiser. If they ask for an affidavit, give them one. If you need help getting the ad onto publicnoticesohio.com reach out to the OMNA’s Jason Sanford.

• While it is our belief, after conversation with some key parties, that the intention behind the changes was to provide an alternative for very small municipalities with very limited funds, the way the language was drafted opened the door for everyone. We suggest you hold your municipalities accountable and encourage your readers to do the same. Let’s face it, the X/Twitter platform is a mess, Facebook is heavily used only by certain demographics and not at all by others. And then there is Instagram, Snapchat and others. Who chooses and how do they choose? Ask your municipal leaders what they’re doing to reach their younger constituents who wouldn’t spend two seconds on Facebook let alone a government website, older constituents or those with broadband issues.

Finally, keep legislative alerts that you receive as a member confidential. These are not intended to be distributed publicly, run as a column or editorial in your paper, quoted from in a news story or shared with other people in the industry in your personal network. Sometimes the situation requires shouting from the rooftops and rallying as many people as you can, but other times quiet diplomacy is more effective.

ONMA member alerts are sent to notify you about important issues and concerns that might affect all our member papers. They are not press releases. If I know I am speaking on the record to the general public I may choose to word something differently than I would in an internal document for members only. Please keep this in mind and do not quote from confidential member-only communications. If you need a quote, please reach out to us.

Last week Elon Musk made a big change to X/Twitter that will directly affect Ohio newspapers which rely on the social media platform to share news articles. This Slate article is the best explanation for the change that we've seen:

"When someone posts a link to an external site, it no longer appears (on X/Twitter) in a card with a picture and a headline. Instead, it shows the image that goes with the webpage (if applicable) and, in small letters, the domain name. The change introduces confusion where none previously existed and carries no discernible user benefit. Some people are clicking on these photographic webpage links thinking that they’re just regular photos to expand. Others might breeze past a tweet with a link in it, not realizing that a picture leads to an article at all. That’s almost certainly Musk’s primary goal with the switch: to discourage people from clicking on links so that they stay within X’s walls, where they can drive up engagement numbers for Musk’s flailing business. It doesn’t matter that removing headlines from linked articles creates obvious opportunities for people to lie about or dramatize where a link will take them. More tweets will now fit on the screen, maybe. Again, the engagement potential is simply robust."

The article goes on to say that "Musk has taken the internet’s best place to get real-time information and made it into a muddle where telling left from right, let alone good information from bad, verges on impossible. That likely pleases Musk, an antagonist of the news media who has business reasons to want on-platform 'citizen journalism' rather than off-platform work by professionals who may not care for him or pay him."