Legislature

With just three days to go, the 2017 legislative session has reached the critical stage where most of the work is done, but major pieces of legislation still hang in the balance and the specter of a special session hung over the building on Thursday when a budget deal fell …

By Steve Ranson New Voices emerged to counteract a Supreme Court decision in the 1980s involving the Hazelwood School District v. Khulmeier. Essentially, this ruling allowed educators to censor student-written articles, stop newspapers from being distributed to the student body and retaliate against journalism advisers who dared promote reasonable free …

Below is a list of many of the bills and bill drafts that we were tracking at the Nevada Press Association during the 2017 session, which concluded June 5. We have two primary interests — open government (meetings, records and public notices) and the newspaper industry, when it may be …

A bill sought by Nevada broadcasters, which would have enabled them to move public notices out of newspapers and onto their websites, died Friday without a vote in the Senate Government Affairs Committee. SB218 was sponsored by Sen. Aaron Ford, D-Las Vegas, who let the bill expire because it didn’t …

At the end of the day, Senate Bill 420, which is the Nevada version of New Voices legislation, was recommended for approval on Thursday by the Senate Committee on Education, the first step toward giving more protection to the rights of student journalists. The bill is sponsored by Sen. Nicole …

A bill in front of the Nevada Legislature would have a profound effect on public notices in the state, and I want to make clear what it would and wouldn’t do. Public notices are a crucial component of a three-pronged foundation that keeps government open and transparent, along with public …

The Nevada Broadcasters Association’s bill, SB218, is a real threat — to newspapers, of course, because it would remove public notices from them, but also to public notice in general. The bill was heard Wednesday by the Senate Government Affairs Committee. Introduced by Sen. Aaron Ford, D- Las Vegas, it’s …

Mark your calendars for Newspaper Day at the Capital, which is set for March 23 during the 2017 session of the Nevada Legislature. All Nevada Press Association members and their employees are invited. It’s a once-every-other-year chance to represent our industry before elected representatives, learn about the process of proposing …

Sen. Aaron Ford’s initiative to bring body-worn cameras to all police agencies in Nevada (SB176) would use fees on telephone service to fund them. Here’s the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s story and the Nevada Independent’s live-tweet coverage of Monday’s hearing in the Senate Government Affairs Committee. I spoke in favor of …