Alaska News Coalition Launching an Online Public Notice Clearinghouse
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From notices of tax delinquent properties to advertisements of upcoming public meetings and project bids, public notices appear in local newspapers almost every day. In Alaska, the revenue from placing public notices totals about $2 million per year, representing one of the largest advertising streams in some community newspapers’ budgets. But reduced printing schedules that some newspapers adopted as cost-cutting measures have complicated how public notices are posted.
The Alaska News Coalition, an all-volunteer nonprofit formed to address economic challenges of news publishing, is hoping that a partnership with “newspapers of record” can help maintain that public notice revenue stream and add value for governmental bodies required to post public notices and to readers who browse them.
Not a Replacement for Printed Notices
At a meeting of the Alaska News Coalition during last week’s Alaska Press Club conference in Anchorage, board chair Larry Persily outlined the Alaska Public Notices website, which the coalition is creating as a one-stop public notice clearinghouse.
Once launched, the website will “in theory give you every public notice a newspaper uploads to the site,” Persily says.
Participating newspapers can upload public notices for free or pay a nominal fee to have someone else upload the notices. Searches will be free; users who want subscription access—such as alerts every time a keyword pops up in a posted public notice—can pay a yearly fee.
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May 2025
The website is still under construction, but the coalition expects to go live in mid-May. Persily, who is also the publisher of the Wrangell Sentinel, says newspapers around Alaska are receiving offers this week for free training at the end of this month, after which notices can be uploaded and the website can go live.
The clearinghouse is modeled on Public Notice Illinois, a website run by the Illinois Press Association. That website was launched in 2008 with the stated goal “to make available to the public every notice that appears in an Illinois newspaper.”
The Alaska News Coalition paid about $3,000 to build the Alaska Public Notices website and will pay about $3,600 a year for the Illinois Press Association to host it. The coalition paid a separate contractor to figure out the best way to make it work for Alaska. “It’s a low-cost gamble,” Persily says.
Persily and other coalition members hope the site will eventually pay for itself through subscriptions. For now, it is being funded with money Alaska News Coalition raised over the past year.
“It’s not an alternative to or a replacement to posting in the newspaper,” Persily clarifies. Entities that require public notices to be posted, such as municipalities or the state, must still pay to post the notices in their local newspaper of record, which will then upload the notice to the website.
It would, however, offer a value-added approach: more eyes potentially seeing the information. If the point of a public notice is to make information available to as many people as possible, the website helps accomplish that.
Verifiable Records
Alaska law doesn’t have a blanket public notice requirement; public notice regulations vary within state departments. Similarly, public notice requirements for different municipalities vary widely.
Nils Andreassen, executive director of the Alaska Municipal League (AML), says some local governments have expressed frustration with the mounting challenges of publishing notices on time.
“For local governments, they want to follow the law first, and they also want to make sure that the public is engaged,” Andreassen says. “We want to give confidence to the public: here’s where you go to have access to these publications from your local government. It needs to be clear and consistent and reduce uncertainty as much as possible.”
Andreassen says it’s not clear if a public notice website is the only solution needed to simplify public notices, but it may help by providing another forum for citizens to keep abreast of issues they are concerned about.
The reason for public notices to be posted remains, however: to ensure taxpayers and citizens can access government decisions. As the New Mexico Press Association puts it on its own public notice website, “for decades public notices are published in newspapers as that independent third-party—to create a verifiable record of the date they were published and show that the content met legal requirements. Without such verification, elected officials and the government entities would be accountable only to themselves.”
Persily says Alaska would become one of about thirty states to use the public notice website format, each of them managed by their respective state’s press association.
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