Dear Allen, Doug and Robin: Please stop stealing from my kids.

"...state law ...requires publication of public notices in newspapers with a general circulation. The reason is obvious, or at least used to be: Government must keep the people it serves informed about its activities, and the local newspaper provides the most effective means to accomplish that.

Now there’s pressure to change the law.

Did the GN&R Editorial Board only endorse City Council Candidates

who said they would continue to subisdise the GN&R?
.

Proposed legislation would allow a city or county to post the required public notice on its own website instead of in the newspaper.

This would save local tax dollars — and cost newspapers revenue.

Taxpayer funded revenue?

Is this why the GN&R Editorial Board

mostly endorsed non-fiscal conservatives?

If the whole discussion were about money, the taxpayers’ interests would come first.

But it’s not a matter of money.

How is it not about money?

...it was a worthwhile expense because the public has a right to be informed about government actions.

Which can easily be found online

like at a publicly funded [internet cafe] library

which Zack can't seem to wait long enough

to waste GSO taxpayer money on?

Holding public meetings is also required by law, but there’s not much point to holding a public meeting if the public doesn’t know about it.

How about telling the public the truth

about where the actual big revenues are Allen, Doug and Robin?

...Many people still lack Internet access, and many of those who have it lack the skill and patience to navigate various governmental websites for the information they need.

Don't many lack the ability to purchase a paper?

Don't many lack the ability to read a paper?

Of those who can read the paper

how many read the sports section

and not the local government stuff?

...For a large number of people, the newspaper remains the primary source of local information, including public notices.

Print readership has declined over the years, but it still exceeds readership of local government websites.

How about the internet in general?

How many who read the paper read public notices?

...local governments should continue to place legal notices where more people will see them.

As Beth Grace, executive director of the North Carolina Press Association, put it with eloquent simplicity, “Public notices need to be where the public notices.”

Why would Allen, Doug and Robin cite their lobbyist?

Should they have noted they were quoting thier lobbyist?

The law should not change, however, because some local governments have to be guided by explicit rules that put the public first.

Don't you mean the "paper of record"

who endorses candidates

after taking in thier advertising money "first"?

...Hiding notices does not serve the public."

Allen, Doug and Robin

"The fundamental principle of socialism

is that its is appropriate to use force to organize society,

to take from some and give to others.

The government has nothing to give.

The government is simply a mechanism which has the power

to take from some to give to others.

It is a way in which some people

can spend other peoples' money

for the benefit of a third party

- and not so incidentally themselves".

Milton Friedman

Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1981, p11.