The week before Christmas, Connecticut’s court system announced that as of Jan. 2, it would moving its notices from newspapers to a bare webpage on the Judicial Branch’s website. “It is expected that this will save a great deal of time and expense, and provide greater accuracy and broader notice than newspaper publication,” the judicial branch said in a statement posted on its website.

Connecticut courts are not required by state statute to publish notices in print, but until last month they relied on newspapers to satisfy their notice requirements, said Chris VandeHoef, executive director of the Connecticut Daily Newspapers Association.

VandeHoef said the first sign that something had changed came early in 2019, when newspapers in Hartford County stopped receiving foreclosure notices. That turned out to be an experiment for a new policy being tested by the courts’ technology committee, said VandeHoef.

“State government’s thirst for keeping information out of the public hands knows no bounds,” VandeHoef told the Associated Press. “Every branch of government in our state should be focused on getting information that is pertinent to the citizens of Connecticut out in as many places possible — not fewer.”

The court operations director for the judicial branch told AP that moving the notices to their website would provide broader broader notice because they will appear in internet searches for the names of the people mentioned in the notices.

“If you Google yourself, [the notice] will be picked up in a Google search,” said Krista Hess.

Of course, people don’t generally Google themselves looking for a notice they don’t know about. And even if they did, they would be far more likely to find the notice posted on a newspaper website than on a bare webpage on the Connecticut judicial branch’s infrequently visited website.

The fact that a representative of the Connecticut court system could frame this issue as newspapers vs the internet — as opposed to newspapers and newspaper websites vs government websites — is a sign of how much more work we have to do as an industry to inform the public that newspapers already publish notices on their websites.