If a public notice runs in a print newspaper and no one sees it, is it really a public notice?
The town of Natick spent more than $21,000 to publish legal notices in MetroWest Daily News in FY25.
This data was revealed in a Freedom of Information Act request to the town for its list of 500-plus vendors paid $5k or more in FY25.
We initially requested this list to see which consulting and other firms were scoring big money from the town, though being in the local news business, the legal notice bill jumped out and grabbed us.
In the scheme of a list that includes payments to vendors in the multiple millions and multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars, the $21k-plus of your tax dollars heading to Metrowest Daily News parent USA Today is relatively peanuts (though getting a chunk of that amount would be significant income for, say, a small independent news organization that actually focuses on Natick).
We’re admittedly biased on this topic, but suggest that those notices appearing in MetroWest in print and online might as well have been done in invisible ink given how many people probably saw them.
To be clear: Paying for these notices is no indictment of Natick’s town government. Natick, like other municipalities, is required by state law to post certain legal notices—based on an outdated and now nonsensical state law—that requires such ads to appear in “print” newspapers regardless of the fact that so few people subscribe to such publications and that many communities are no longer served by such publications. Tens of thousands of people, on the other hand, read Natick Report each month.
Natick gets to check off a legal box for paying MetroWest Daily parent USA Today, for example, to post notices like those about Planning Board hearings on the since quashed car wash plan for 625 Worcester St. So technically, your tax dollars are at work here. The town paid $156.05 in February for a legal notice to run twice in print and twice online for a topic (by the way, the News never actually wrote about the proposed car wash to our knowledge, whereas we covered that story at least six times, including in a couple of detailed articles based on the hearings).
MetroWest is owned by Gannett, which is owned by USA Today, a $1.1b McLean, Va. company whose CEO makes north of $4m.
“Shop Local” indeed…
Natick has made moves through Town Meeting to give its leaders more flexibility about where it posts notices in the future, once the changes are officially incorporated into the town rules. Natick already makes such notices available on its website, and through email alerts to those who sign up. It also issues abutters’ notices regarding projects near people’s homes and businesses. Beyond this, the town remains in a “holding pattern,” we’ve been told.
Nothing technically prevents towns and cities from trying to make even more people aware of important upcoming meetings by running paid legal notices on online-only sites in addition to print newspapers. Though municipalities like Natick are watching their pennies, so need to balance the perceived value of increased communication vs. additional expenses.
Wellesley, in an effort to ensure as many people as possible do know about important upcoming meetings and deadlines, runs select legal notices on our online-only Swellesley Report. It did this recently for a Special Town Meeting and has done so in the past for Town Meeting warrant deadlines. The state’s Department of Transportation also recently paid for a legal notice on Natick Report regarding the Rte. 27/9 interchange project. Such additional notices that people might actually read could reach, for example, abutters of direct abutters whose lives might be affected by a project that could make their neighborhood into a cut-through route but who wouldn’t otherwise be directly contacted by the government.
There is some movement in the state legislature to make changes to legal notice rules. In fact a couple of House bills would try to save cities and towns a few bucks by allowing them to post notices on their own websites and not on news sites at all.
Meanwhile, we have been working for years with state legislators, including Rep. Alice Peisch, to try to get the state’s rules changed so that notices can be posted on online news sites instead of print ones. It’s been a slog, but we remain hopeful that common sense might prevail.
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Question: Wellesley pays for and files legal notices in the Swellesley report and in print media to be in compliance with state law? So, paying twice for the same legal notices?
Wellesley pays for legal notices to be in print publications to be in compliance with state law. It pays to post some on Swellesley so that people will more likely actually see the notices… So yes, they pay double. However, we’re talking about $100 per notice. We’re not talking about the sort of big money, say, doled out to consultants etc to do their studies on this and that
But what about senior citizens who do not use computers or do not have cell phones? We care too.
Hi Susan, yes, that is the argument for continuing with print notices. But fewer & fewer people are subscribing to print newspapers, so realistically, those notices are hardly reaching anyone… not to say the people who subscribe to print papers aren’t worth reaching. We’re just suggesting way more people will see the notices on sites like ours. Bob