17 April—Among the non-news today is that yesterday the United States Commission of Fine Arts, comprising toadies hand-picked or not fired by Donald Trump, gave preliminary design approval to the “concept” of the monstrous and monstrously inappropriate Arc de Trump, thus allowing that monument to Trump’s unbridled narcissism to slither forward.

Meanwhile, back in Connecticut, legislation to drop the requirement that municipalities post legal notices in print newspapers instead of or in addition to municipal websites and other places has once again made it part of the way to enactment. Contrary to what 66^th District Rep. Karen Reddington-Hughes, who opposes the legislation, has written in letters to print and digital news media, the Connecticut General Assembly has in fact not yet voted in favor of the measure. But she’s partly right. At the end of her cautionary letter, Karen wonders what will happen “[i]f this bill passes the Senate.” Doesn’t she realize that the state senate is half of the General Assembly?

Anyway, it’s no surprise that editorials in the Hearst RepublicanAmerican among other rags also are inveighing against legislation that will deprive them of what in reality amounts to minimal revenue. And nobody takes newspaper editorials seriously anyway.

So House Bill 5289 made it out of committee unanimously and out of the House of Representatives two-to-one, 96 to 48. The Senate, as Karen implied, hasn’t yet voted on it and may never get around to it. Similar legislation has almost made it through in the past, only to die or be aborted one way or another.

Karen and self-serving editorial writers maintain that besides decreasing transparency—and conversely increasing dreaded opacity—of local governments, not requiring posting of legal ads in actual printed newspapers will result in a “decline in citizen engagement.” And most writers cite appropriately selective research to prove their points. (Who doesn’t do that?)

Put simply, though, that’s a totally specious argument, since truly engaged citizens won’t allow themselves to be disengaged simply because they have to visit a municipal website to see what’s cooking. Given the disgracefully inadequate local coverage of most self-professed local newspapers like the Hearst RepublicanAmerican, they can’t be depended on for local and timely news coverage anyway. So they’re quite deservedly losing readers.

But all the print rags also have digital presence. And that’s where it’s at now and will be even more so in the future. Unfortunately. So the municipal legals would still be fully accessible through online newspapers, which would still pocket the revenue. And that’s what they’re after, after all—after they cease hard-copy publication completely.

More and more readers are reading online—only because there are fewer and fewer real paper newspapers and fewer and fewer people who don’t or won’t or can’t access the internet.

In that case, since you’d have to go online and to a website to get legals anyway, why not just go directly to the municipal website, thus essentially cutting out an unnecessary middleman and saving a little taxpayer money—and depriving wicked bean-counting newspaper publishers of revenue they don’t deserve in the first place?