Maybe a state infamous for corruption at all levels of governance should be fighting for more transparency, not less. But that’s not the New Jersey way, apparently. Legal ads are a contentious issue all over right now. Newspapers, the traditional home to legal ads of all sorts throughout the country, are struggling on many fronts. New Jersey lawmakers are using those struggles as an excuse to make information even harder to access. After gutting the state’s open records law last year, the state is trying to take legal notices and ads into the dark recesses of municipal websites in what they claim is a “cost-cutting” measure that would essentially make those notices only accessible to people who are able to navigate municipal websites. Anyone who has gone to a city website to find specific information knows they can usually only find positive news that the city is already pushing to the front and center on its social media feeds. All other queries usually need some working knowledge of how that specific site is structured. Even then, information is frequently outdated, incorrect, or impossible to locate quickly. Add to those difficulties, each municipal website is built differently, maintained separately, and updated at varying rates. In effect, a citizen of Mercer County would need to visit the county website and each of the 12 towns’ websites (each with a different site structure to navigate) to find all of the legal notices pertinent to them, rather than perusing the classified ads in their local newspaper. Sure, times are changing. Most news readers get news on their phone or tablet and through links shared by friends on their social media platform of choice. The recent announcement that a major newspaper chain in New Jersey (The Trentonian’s age-old competitor The Times of Trenton included) is ending print production and moving all content online only has pushed state lawmakers to renew their quest to end the government requirement to pay for legal ads in newspapers. The New Jersey Press Association (NJPA), an organization The Trentonian is a member of, has proposed a bill that not only keeps legal notices accessible in newspapers, but adds the option to host those ads in online-only publications that provide news coverage to the municipalities those notices originate from. This is an important step in modernizing the process. It in no way stops the municipalities from also posting those notices on their own sites, but provides more access to the public information citizens deserve and need. The NJPA believes the current law proposed at the state level would undermine the public’s access to that information. “Instead of placing legal notification where people look for reliable news and coverage of government, elected officials now contemplate scattering this important public business to hundreds of municipal websites, hundreds of school board sites, dozens of county and sewer authority sites, and the many hundreds of byzantine state web pages,” the NJPA said in a press release. A proposed alternative from the NJPA sets a series of requirements, including a rate structure that keeps costs roughly the same as current rates, which are set by the state and have not changed since 1983. The NJPA bill would change the print requirement to allow online news agencies to qualify for public notices, assuming they meet the same criteria currently used for newspapers. Those include covering the municipalities and counties that the legal notices pertain to and a clause that if no website or newspaper exists in that municipality, one covering the county would meet the requirements. The proposal also includes sharing all public notices on the NJPA’s free website, njpublicnotices.com. While online publication of legal ads still leaves some readers who still love holding the newspaper as they read out of the loop for public notices, it is a vast improvement for transparency over the state’s current proposal. But New Jersey is trying to hide public information and it has already weakened OPRA, so don’t expect this legislature to push towards openness when it is clearly trending toward the old days of government behind closed doors where back room deals determine how your tax money is spent and corruption goes unchecked and unseen.