Opinion: Patch's Push to Modify Legal Ads Law is a Good Thing

If you have followed MonroviaNow for a long time, you may recall me expressing serious doubts about the ability of AOL's Patch chain of local-news websites - including Monrovia Patch - to survive. I still have doubts, but in reading this article ( http://goo.gl/6iheU ) I find that AOL is pushing to have an antiquated law changed, and if it succeeds I think the California Patch websites could survive and maybe even thrive. Years ago I wrote my assemblyman urging just such a change, but maybe with AOL's clout something will happen.

This antiquated law requires that legal notices (those tiny-print columns of text that you used to skip over in the back of your newspaper when you used to read a newspaper) must be printed in a newsPAPER. The logic, which was probably good in the 1800s, was that there is certain information that businesses and local governments must put in front of the eyes of the public, and so those businesses and governments must buy advertising to do that. And that, of course, is a nice source of revenue for newspapers.

But today, newspapers are declining and online news is growing, and it is increasingly reasonable that online-only publications be allowed to accept legal advertising if they can show they have adequate readership.

Obviously, this would benefit Patch and other local online-only media (maybe even MonroviaNow), but I suspect newspapers will have a conniption fit as that is probably one of the few revenue sources keeping their paper versions alive. But newspapers could still run legal ads (in paper or online), so the only real difference is that newsPAPERs wouldn't be the ONLY venue for running the ads.

Now, a related argument is this: Why require legal ads at all since a government database can make the information just as easily available to the public as if it was published in a local news outlet?

Hmm... good point. The only arguments I can think of in reply are that the government may see value in pushing the information out there where it is in people's faces, or it may see value in supporting local news media, but I gotta admit, those responses are pretty weak.

- Brad Haugaard