GRATIOT COUNTY — Foreclosure sales, zoning hearings, election notices and requests for bids in Gratiot County are printed each week in the Gratiot County Herald. A statewide online archive that Michigan law says those notices must also be placed in shows none of them.
What the law says
Michigan’s law on publishing notices in newspapers was amended in 2022. It says a person who operates a newspaper in which a notice is published “shall do both of the following, at no additional cost beyond what the person charges for the print publication.”
First, within 72 hours of receiving a request to publish a notice, the newspaper must make it available on its own website, in an area that “cannot be placed behind any sort of pay wall.” Second, it must “place the notice on a website that is established and maintained by a state association of newspapers that represents a majority of newspapers in this state as a comprehensive central repository.” The Michigan Press Association runs such a site, mipublicnotices.com.
What the repository shows
The repository lists the Gratiot County Herald among the publications a visitor can choose. On Sept. 24 and again on Sept. 30, this publication searched it with only that filter set. Both times the result was “No notices found.”
To test whether the search was working, we ran the same search for the Midland Daily News. It returned 2,520 notices. A search by county, for Gratiot with no newspaper selected, returned 11 notices, all of them statewide items from 2020. No local Gratiot County notice from any newspaper appeared.
What the Herald’s own website shows
The Herald does post its notices on its own site, free and without a paywall, in weekly bundles labeled with the print date. Since mid-January 2026, the listing shows them posted the day before or the day of publication in nearly every week.
That was not so last fall. For the print issues of Oct. 9, 16, 23 and 30, Nov. 6 and 13, and Dec. 25, 2025, and Jan. 1, 2026, the site’s own posting dates are six to 14 days after the print date. Because a request to publish comes before the print date, those postings fell outside the 72-hour window in the law. Four more weeks in 2026 (April 23, June 11, July 2 and Aug. 6) show a six-day gap.
Why it matters, and what it does not mean
Local governments pay for these notices with public money. County claims lists from 2012, the most detailed we have located, show payments to the Herald for drain-office legal publications, election notices and the treasurer’s tax-foreclosure listing, including a single payment of $6,669. The county’s current yearly total is not published.
The purpose of the repository is to let anyone search every notice in the state in one place and sign up for alerts. A Gratiot County resident who relies on it today would find nothing about Gratiot County.
Several cautions apply. The law states a duty but no penalty, and whether a missing repository entry affects a notice’s legal validity is a question for courts, not for this report. The Herald is not alone: another newspaper that circulates in the county does not appear in the repository’s publication list at all. We have not determined why the Herald’s notices are absent; a technical or clerical cause is possible. And this publication does not sell or carry legal notices.
The Gratiot County Herald and the Michigan Press Association have not been asked to comment for this report. Either is welcome to respond at contactus@gcwhistleblower.com, and any response will be published in full.