The Hoosier State Press Association requests that publishers start coding public notice advertising as part of an upgrade to HSPA website indianapublicnotices.com.
The association designed the website to collect in one place all public notices from member newspapers.
It serves residents in a variety of ways, from those trying to find a recently published notice impacting their neighborhood to a construction firm president looking for government projects to submit bids on throughout the state.
Protect public notices
Who: Indiana newspaper publishers
What: HSPA requests that member papers print a code – hspaxlp – with every public notice. The font of the code should be at least 4 points.
When: Please start doing this now.
Where: The code should go at the end of each public notice.
Why: The code will allow software to copy the public notice from a PDF for posting online.
HSPA requests information
The HSPA Board of Directors will soon ask member newspapers to upload PDF files of their pages to an FTP site in order to post public notices at indianapublicnotices.com.
To prepare for that update, HSPA asks publishers to please send the following information to Shawn Goldsby at sgoldsby@hspa.com:
• Your newspaper name.
• Your publication days.
• Names of employees who will upload PDFs.
• Those individuals’ phone numbers and email addresses.
If a newspaper by chance doesn’t create PDFs of its pages in the production process, please let HSPA know.
Publishers can direct questions about this project to Steve Key, HSPA executive director and general counsel, at skey@hspa.com or (317) 624-4427.
The originally designed public notices website collected notices for about 75 of the state’s more than 160 newspapers. That number wasn’t adequate to the HSPA Board of Directors, so the board decided to change the information-collection process to increase the participation level.
HSPA is now at the start of the transition to a website operated by Tecnavia Press Inc.
The HSPA Board of Directors requests that member newspapers include a short code – hspaxlp – at the end of each public notice they publish. The font of the code should be at least 4 points.
This will allow Tecnavia to identify newspaper pages that contain public notices and include them on the indianapublicnotices.com website.
Newspapers should inform their billing departments that if by chance the code adds a line to the public notices, they should not charge the government unit for that extra line.
It’s vitally important that newspapers get into the habit of including “hspaxlp” in all public notices to make the website a viable weapon in the fight to preserve public notice publication requirements.
In the near future the HSPA Board of Directors will ask newspapers to upload PDF files of their pages to an FTP site operated by Tecnavia.
Tecnavia will run the PDFs through software that will allow for word-search capabilities on the public notice website.
To prepare for that update, HSPA asks publishers to please send answers to the following questions to Shawn Goldsby at skey@hspa.com:
• Your newspaper name.
• The name of the people who will be responsible for uploading your PDFs.
• Those individuals’ phone numbers and email addresses.
• Your publication days.
If a newspaper doesn’t create PDFs of its pages in the production process, please let HSPA know.
Publishers can direct questions about this project to Steve Key, HSPA executive director and general counsel, at skey@hspa.com or (317) 624-4427.
