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Most modern states just post a sign over the door prior to opening that X company seeks Y license and this location.

Yeah, that works for changes at a physical location. What about founding of an LLC or other less tangible changes? Even with a physical sign it would be nice to have a searchable long term record. That seems to be what newspapers fulfilled; public broadcast and a reasonable long-term archive.

Around here the Company Court (which decides that a company formation was lawful and registers the company) has a journal/gazette, and that's the official record. Nowadays it's of course fully on-line. And lawyers (who submit the paperwork of the new company) do it exclusively on-line (they basically upload a signed ZIP of the scanned pages and an XML)!

The clerks at this court look at the scanned pages and confirm that yes they do say what the XML says, and then this gets published.

People can search for company histories, look at their bylaws, etc.

Similarly there's a different gov service for publishing corporate yearly financial reports.

Why isn't something like that for US states?

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