One of the recent resolutions from the Wyoming Association of Municipalities (WAM) would give “local governments the choice of how and where to publish the required memorialization and notice under Wyoming law.”
I don’t think this implementation is a good idea, for several reasons.
Firstly, this phrasing gives no minimum requirement for where memorialization and notice should be published.
If the goal is to allow greater reach of notice by allowing local governments to post notice online this resolution severely falls short. It does not specify the notice must be published on the town website or in an online publication. Under this wording, a local government could provide notice by sticking a piece of paper on the door of town hall.
At best local governments would do as they have always done and put notice in a newspaper of general circulation, at worst lazy or corrupt governments would actively obfuscate information and make the public have to go through a series of hoops in order to discover anything.
Instead of an open-ended choice there should be a minimum requirement of viewership or a list of acceptable places to publish information.
Secondly, memorialization should not be done solely online. Part of the reason why memorialization and notice is published in newspapers is because it provides an archive of government actions.
The internet is not a reliable archive. When things are published online, that information remains online only as long as the webpage is supported. If it stops being supported, whatever was posted on that webpage disappears.
Link rot is a term that is used to describe the issue of hyperlinks that go nowhere. When you click on a dead link it redirects you to an error page, telling you the page you were trying to access no longer exists.
In the terms of internet archiving practices, link rot is a huge issue. Pew Research Center, in a study called “When Online Content Disappears” found a quarter of websites which existed between 2013 and 2023 no longer exist, typically due to an individual page being removed from a website.
“Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today,” the study reads. “23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with a high level of site traffic and those with less are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.”
This shows that digital notice is not a replacement for print notice, because there is no guarantee information posted online will be there decades in the future.
Additionally, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to find information online. Search engines are rapidly being changed. Engines like Google want profit first and foremost, so they prioritize showing advertisements over the content you are actually trying to find. Algorithms are altered so content that was once easy to find is now buried under pages of paying websites.
This is even more true with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). Google has recently implemented an AI overview at the top of its search, so the first information you see after typing in the search bar is created by a generative model. This can cause a whole host of issues, one of the most prominent being AI hallucinations, where the model makes up information not found in its training data. In other words, outright false information is given to the user.
Even if search engines were to work perfectly, AI is also increasing the amount of slop published online. It’s not uncommon to find websites tailored for search engine optimization, where everything is chock-full of keywords from common searches. These articles aren’t necessarily true or helpful, but they hope by tailoring themselves towards searches you will click on the website and be shown all of the ads they have on their page.
With this in mind, it is easy to see how the internet is becoming more and more unusable over time.
Okay, that’s all well and good, but print media is dying, right? Not exactly.
I think it is undeniable that younger generations are leaning more and more towards the digital world over print. However, I would say this is more because of convenience than preference. I have some friends who genuinely prefer using digital media over print, but I also have quite a few friends who prefer print media over digital.
Most of the time, when they read something like a digital book, it’s because they have easy access to it on their phone and not because they like it more than a physical book.
So digital media is not a replacement for print, and when presented with a convenient print option they will typically take it. I think this is evidenced by the fact that when I am at school at the University of Wyoming, print options for newspapers are provided in several places around campus. Copies of the Branding Iron are placed in common areas like the Union, and the library gets weekly print copies of many newspapers around the state.
Even though digital media is on the rise, from what I have seen people my age have not completely abandoned print media.
In this mindset of convenience, it is a lot more convenient to look at public notices where they have always been rather than trying to figure out a new location in an internet that is slowly dying. Digital should be a supplement and an option to gain information, not an outright replacement for print media.
Local governments should have an option to post notice online, after they have already posted that notice in print.
The Wyoming Press Association, which represents all 40 legal newspapers in the state of Wyoming, has already done this. The organization has invested in www.wyopublicnotices.com , which provides a digital, statewide repository of public notices that is free to the public to view.
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