A strongly-worded editorial a few days ago in The Record urged Phil Murphy to veto a bill that would allow public bodies to publish legal ads on their websites and not in newspapers.

Murphy, not surprisingly, ignored the advice and signed the bill.

The edit quite correctly noted Murphy's less than stellar record on transparency - which is something all politicians preach, but do not always practice.

It brought up the governor's gutting of the Open Public Records Act, or OPRA, and his support for essentially ending the independent Election Law Enforcement Commission, or ELEC.

Bottom line: Governing bodies now have more ammunition to deny the release of public records and ELEC membership is the sole province of the governor, not the Senate. So much for independence.

The new way to publish legal ads, which include ordinances, budgets, meeting notices and the like - fits into the pattern Murphy and legislative Democrats have established. As we often see, when push comes to shove, many public officials opt for secrecy. And this is quite the bipartisan endeavor.

At the same time, any objective look must conclude that the state's daily newspapers have "unclean hands" in this matter. The basic reference is to the Star-Ledger and its smaller properties and Gannett, which owns the aforementioned Record and many other papers across New Jersey.

These publications no longer regularly cover local news. Some of this is because of cutbacks, but some of it is attributed to management decisions that local news is irrelevant. That's right, people don't care about property taxes, local schools and what gets built down the block. Such idiotic views among corporate newspaper owners have become widespread over the last decade or so.

So, reporters no longer regularly cover town councils, school boards and significant planning board meetings. Not surprisingly, readership has plummeted.

This raises a very practical question:

If daily newspapers no longer cover public bodies, why should public bodies give them legal ads?

It's not an easy question to answer.

There are, of course, some newspapers that still faithfully cover towns the way they should be covered - weeklies.

The loss of legal ad revenue might be devastating to them. Lawmakers apparently were not thinking of that. Or to be more cynical, perhaps some lawmakers, many of whom were once local officials, don't want reporters covering local meetings.

Amanda Richardson is Executive Director of the Corporation for New Jersey Local Media, a non-profit that publishes 13 weeklies in North Jersey.

Here is her take on the bill:

"Obviously, we're not thrilled about the resolution or the fact that it was a bit rushed and confusing at the end. The legislation really could have benefitted from public hearings. It potentially could hurt us fiscally, although it will likely have a much more devastating effect on the small individual weeklies.

We qualify as an online publication under the law, which is a positive. But more importantly, going forward this could constrict the number of people who see public notices, as our readership is much larger than the number of people who typically visit municipal websites, and it's unclear where an archive would live. Currently any notices we publish are searchable on our website back at least 15 years and in print archives back to when the newspapers were founded.

Obviously more transparency is in the public interest, and we hope to encourage the municipalities, school boards, counties that place their notices with us to continue to do so. We're working on a plan to help everyone we cover continue to reach the broadest audience possible."

As noted, weeklies like the Hills newspapers, still cover your local council and school board. One hopes that they and other weeklies will continue to do so.

As for Gannett, its opposition to this bill would be much more meaningful if its newspapers still covered local government.