By Massachusetts law, public or legal notices (notices of public hearings, requests for bids, estate probates, etc.) must be published by state, city and town governments in a printed “newspaper of general circulation” serving their community. Those notices may also be published on the paper’s website (see MGL Part 1, Title 1, Chapter 4, Sec. 13), but if the publication is digital-only, it doesn’t meet the legal standard.

Northeastern University Journalism Professor Dan Kennedy made the case for change in a blog post (“Mass. law governing legal ads needs to be updated to include digital-only outlets,” April 2, 2022) after Gannett, which owns most of the suburban weeklies in the Boston area, announced that they were closing 19 print newspapers in Eastern Massachusetts and merging nine others into four. As a result, some towns including Acton have had to resort to placing their legal notices in the distant Lowell Sun, which has next to no readership in the towns in question — see “‘It’s devastating.’ As Boston-area weeklies close, towns ponder civic life without local news” (Boston Globe, April 8, 2022).

There are two parallel efforts that aim to change state law to remove the print-newspaper publication requirement for legal notices: statewide legislation and home rule petitions.