Editorial: Media Bill Will Save Tax Dollars, Not Threaten Democracy as Many KY Newspapers Claim

Meredith-Supported Bill Passes House

By Darren Doyle, owner and founder of The Edmonson Voice:
"Threat to our democracy," "danger to transparency," and "protection of democratic principles" are all fun, scary phrases that printed newspapers have spread over the last few weeks as a result of their lobbying against Kentucky House Bill 368, which has passed the House 37-0 and is now headed to the Senate.

I stopped writing editorials and opinion pieces years ago because that's not the real purpose of the news, but there's plenty of inaccurate info that was recently shared by printed papers and I have a right to weigh in.

If passed and signed into law, this bill will eliminate the old requirement that local governments such as fiscal courts, city councils, public school systems, and others must publish public notices and advertisements in a printed newspaper of record.

This law is extremely outdated and it wastes your tax dollars. If the bill doesn't pass, it will continue to waste them.

Printed newspapers all across the state have plastered their editorials everywhere (ironically mostly online) to scare you into believing this is bad for you and that you might even be in harm's way as a result of this "dangerous" bill.

The only things in danger are the pockets of printed newspapers. You see, the requirement that comes along with all these governments having to publish this information in printed paper also comes with a price tag, that you, the taxpayer, fund, and conveniently for the papers, it's not cheap.

While I can't speak for any printed newspaper's budget, on multiple occasions I have received inside information regarding one particular paper's actual mailed out circulation, and it's unbelievably bad in comparison with other papers and online outlets, of course. Bad as in less than 25% of what they actually claim. The real reason that some newspapers are suddenly concerned about this bill is that a big chunk of their funding is about to run out.

Another thing newspapers conveniently left out of their scare tactics is that our local State Representative Michael Meredith sponsored an amendment to the bill that would still require local governments to submit this SAME information to their printed paper of record, but at no cost. Wouldn't this surely save the sake of transparency and raise the victory banners for those fighting for democracy? You would think, but newspapers don't seem to share the same excitement when you add the "no cost" part of it.

A local paper recently falsely accused a former county official of only releasing news information to a "local social media site" (which was obviously supposed to be us) in a fear-mongering editorial that was first published where? You guessed it--on their website and Facebook Page. Why? Because even they know if anyone actually reads it, it will be online.

The Edmonson Voice rarely receives requests to run these types of notices on our network, which is MUCH more cost effective than printed papers. How much more? In some cases, a printed paper charges nearly 50X more.  We have covered countless meetings and forums where these notices were run in a printed newspaper instead of our network, yet most of these meetings have ZERO attendance.

These agencies don't avoid running them on the Voice because they don't want you to know about them. They avoid it because printing them in a newspaper is ridiculously overpriced and inefficient and they simply can't afford any more cost than required. We occasionally get requests to run them and we charge a modest fee. Even with 15K weekly readers, they rarely receive any real traffic on our site.

One example of this is the annual delinquent tax bills. The county is forced to pay for them to be published in a local paper at a cost of around $2,550, according to the Edmonson County Treasurer's Office. Yes, you read that correctly--over two thousand dollars--for ONE WEEK. We do the same thing for anywhere from $55 to $85 for the exact same thing. We would argue that most taxpayers would see that as a waste of YOUR money. With the amendment to the HB 368, governments would STILL be required to submit this info to papers, they just wouldn't be forced to waste tax dollars on them--dollars that are going in the pockets of the newspapers.

According to the Edmonson County Treasurer's Office, the county government was forced to spend $8,950.50 of your tax dollars during the last fiscal year for printed newspaper advertising. In addition, Edmonson County Schools were forced to spend $2,548.62 on the same type of printed ads. With just two county agencies in one year, $11,499.12 of tax dollars was spent on ads in a printed newspaper that nearly no one even saw. And even if they did, it is impossible for a newspaper to prove that it was actually read.

In 2024, we were paid a total of $715 to run advertisements from the Edmonson County Fiscal Court, which was voluntary by the county government. That included a total of 6 different ads running for a total of 13 weeks that the county chose to run by their own fiscal court vote. Any taxpayer can certainly disagree with those funds being spent, but the difference is that a taxpayer can speak to their magistrate or judge-executive if they don't like it. If your government isn't listening to you, you have a right to vote them out.

Edmonson County Schools spent a total of $110 with advertising with the Edmonson Voice last year. Sometimes we even donate these ads and we have never charged to advertise any school sports program, extra-curricular, or academic program for our schools.

Edmonson County is broke as a joke and every dollar matters. We have water issues. We have infrastructure issues. A man died because a county road remains in disrepair, which is now going on three and half years. Remember the $430K Preserving Edmonson Pride project to give a facelift to the Community Center and Courthouse? It's not happening (at least for now) because in order to do it, certain utility poles have to be moved. The cost is more than the county can cover.

This editorial is not for the purpose that digital outlets like us also receive these same tax dollars. In fact, there are so many public announcements that I don't even want on our network because no one reads them. I don't want non-engaging content on this site. Governments choose to advertise with us because they know people will see the content. They only give us the content that really matters and we give them a discount to do so.

It's also important to reiterate: if this bill is passed and signed into legislation, our government and local agencies would still be required to publish this information on their own websites and forums. And yes, it's possible that info could be published on a government-run site and then maliciously edited afterwards, but it's 2025. When that happens, there's always some screenshot-happy social media warrior ready to let the world know. If your local governments are doing this then vote them out. Apparently no one cares one way or another about these public notices here in Edmonson County. If they did, people would attend these meetings.

Of course, it's also completely possible that people actually do care, but maybe the reality is that no one knows about these meetings and announcements because they are only printed in a local paper.