In the 1990s and early 2000's in Baltimore Maryland, the adjudicated paper was not the Baltimore Sun. It was a smaller paper dedicated to business. The larger papers that ran the full gambit of news stories including investigations into government were not included as adjudicated papers -- for obvious conflict of interest reasons.
As print media has shrunk, it seems those on the list for adjudicated media have grown -- and the legal advertising costs have skyrocketed because they have a captured audience. It now costs $80-100 for a one or two sentence legal classified ad. That use to be $10-20 years ago. That is a very profitable cost per square inch of print and given it's a business that the government and some citizens must use, it's made it a target for large investors.
Grok has estimated that 25-75% of all revenue for adjudicated papers now is coming from mandated legal advertising. That is a major problem now given everyone knows the local media does NOT seem to be covering local corruption stories.
Ultimately the Moral of this story is that there is a need to terminate use of all papers for legal notices. A county run webpage now provides an alternative solution with the following benefits and no draw backs to the county.
A county web page for legal notices::
is more cost effective and saves county money
removes a conflict of interest between media and government that may have prevented honest and clear reporting about government concerns for decades and
provides a single place for reviewing legal ads which actually makes them accessible and scannable again, as they should have alwaays been. As of now you'd have to view 8 publications to try to track legal ads. That's never how it was supposed to be.
Below is a list of the companies on the adjudicated media list for Monterey County. Do you see any problems with this?
Every major and minor pubilcation is on the list -- and thus every outlet may be concerned about negatvie reporting against the county for fear of shifting revenues to others.
Most of these owners are no longer local and some are owned by Venture Capital companies.
In a county of 400,000, that is not a lot of distribution and it's very fragmented.
In Summary, the county may now be directly subsidizing some or all of these papers, and in return, these papers may not be proerly reporting on county concerns, creating bigger problems.
See other pages on this website for mor detailed concerns and some tests that were run to see if they would report on relevant concerns. The outcome was bad.
