“I also fix the copy machine,” said Norris, whose paper for more than half a century has been the main lens into Village Hall for Garden City, a well-to-do Long Island suburb known for its handsome, slate-roofed Tudor homes, good schools and easy commute into Manhattan.
For much of that time, the village’s eight-member board has voted annually to select The News as its official newspaper, a designation that gives the paper exclusive rights to run an assortment of paid legal notices — hearings, local law changes, zoning updates and the like — that Garden City must post publicly nearly every week under state law.
But recently, relations have grown icy between The News and the village’s board of trustees after some tough coverage, most notably the handling of the redevelopment of the St. Paul’s School, a deteriorating national landmark where President Donald Trump’s late brother Fred Trump Jr. attended and where a soccer field was named Trump Field for their father, Fred Trump.
In what Norris regards as retaliation, the board abruptly announced recently that it had voted unanimously to steer the notices to her competitor, The Garden City Life, which has a much smaller circulation: about 1,800 paid subscribers.
The board also said it might cut off Norris from the news it provides each week for listings, calendars and columns on senior issues, parks and libraries.
While this seems like just a small-town controversy, it reflects the existential crisis engulfing the newspaper industry. As print advertising dries up, public notices — dry as their prose may be — provide an increasingly vital source of revenue that is crucial to the survival of local newspapers.
Legal notices announcing public actions like purchases, estate notices and government contract information date to Colonial times as a means to provide information about government activities.
New York City, with its enormous volume of legal notices, puts out an entire print newspaper largely for that purpose: The City Record, which has been publishing continuously since 1873.
Nationwide, state laws require a municipality to designate one print publication each year as its official paper to handle these notices. But increasingly, many state lawmakers across the country have been calling for the notices to be posted for free on government websites, instead of in print papers.
In 2018, at least 88 bills were introduced to eliminate or reduce the use of printed public notices, most of which did not pass, said Richard Karpel, executive director of the Public Notice Resource Center, who added that the number of such bills has risen in recent years.
Many were sponsored or supported by elected officials with testy relationships with the media, Karpel said, including former Republican governors Chris Christie of New Jersey and Paul LePage of Maine.
“Eliminating newspaper notices would cripple many newspapers,” Karpel said. “It would reduce the already shrinking profit margins of most large papers and newspaper chains, and it would completely obliterate smaller newspapers, especially those that publish in rural areas.”
There are plenty of examples of government officials using the notices to try to strong-arm newspapers over their coverage.
Richard Abel, publisher of The Westmore News, which publishes two paid weekly newspapers north of New York City in Westchester County, said an official from the Village of Rye Brook threatened to divert its public notices and asked officials in neighboring municipalities to do the same, unless he fired a critical columnist. Abel refused and ran a column scolding the officials for trying to squash them “via economic sanctions.” The villages never pulled the ads, he said.
“I told them what to do with their notices,” Abel said. “If I bend for that, then they own me. I’d rather go out of business than be subservient to them.”
Steve Blank, who publishes weekly newspapers on the North Shore of Long Island, said he has had public notices shifted from his papers by government officials, including a village official who refused to give him notices because he printed a letter to the editor that was critical of that official.
In Garden City, the board announced its decision on paid notices at its January meeting. Various residents asked the board why it was redirecting its notices to a publication with less than one-quarter the circulation of the News, which dates to 1923.
One resident asked if the change was the result of a “temper tantrum.” Mayor Brian Daughney refused to elaborate.
As to whether The News would be cut off from other information from the village, the mayor told attendees, “We’ll have to decide.”
Daughney and the village attorney, Peter Bee, declined to comment for this article.
The dispute has generated buzz in Garden City, a village of 23,000 with a median home sale price of roughly $800,000 and a median household income of about $150,000.
It is home to actress Susan Lucci and author Nelson DeMille, as well as the Garden City Golf Club, an 1899 institution whose membership is not open to women.
Norris, whose father bought The News in 1974, has not exactly curried favor with the board or the mayor: Her editorials have accused them of conducting much of the village’s business in private.
Norris said her advertising revenue comes largely from print ads from real estate agents and other local businesses. Still, though the notices account for a much smaller fraction, the motive behind pulling them was vindictive and troubling, she said.
She wrote an article under the headline “Mayor: Village may cut off information to News,” and in an editorial, called the change an attempt to censor her coverage and vowed that the paper would not back down.
In a publisher’s column last month, she wrote a piece called “The Empire Strikes Back” and accused the board of trying “to use the power of their offices and your tax money to try to do something unconscionable — muzzle criticism of their actions in this newspaper” by “cutting off the various columns and press releases from all parts of the village, so that we couldn’t bring that information to you.”
Norris said there has been a notable rise in opposition to her coverage of Village Hall since Trump entered the White House.
After a meeting in August where someone shouted “fake news” after the mention of her paper, she wrote an editorial — “It Trickles Down” — decrying the Trump administration’s attempt “to marginalize the news media.”
“Even here in Garden City we’ve encountered echoes of it,” she wrote, adding that, “The tenor of the local debate seems to also reflect the extreme polarization that we’ve seen nationally.”
Dave Gil de Rubio, editor of The Life, said that he welcomed getting the notices, especially since the newspaper, founded in 1985, has sometimes been regarded as “the little stepbrother to The News.”
The Life is one of the smaller of the 17 local weeklies published in Nassau County by Anton Media Group, which says its total paid circulation is 75,000.
Gil de Rubio said that his coverage of the village board has never been soft and that he had never sought the paid notices.
“It’s a nice thing, and we’re not going to turn it away,'’ he said, “but we have no control over these things.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.