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Out of Print but Not Out of News: Canadian Record’s Impact Lives Online and in New Public TV Documentary
For more than 30 years, Laurie Ezzell Brown has stepped into her office at the Canadian (Texas) Record to let her community know the news.
Her story, and the story of the 130-year-old paper she took over after her father’s death, are the subject of a documentary set to appear on PBS today (May 6, 2024) via broadcast and streaming.
“For the Record,” a film by Heather Courtney about the Canadian Record will air as part of the documentary series Reel South. The documentary examines the newspaper’s place in the rural Texas Panhandle, the struggle rural newspapers are experiencing nationally, and Brown’s decision to sell the paper,
Shooting for the documentary was completed before Brown decided to stop print production of the Record in March of 2023. Brown continues to publish online, and the message of the film still resonates, Courtney said.
“I think it shows how important newspapers are to the community, whether the paper is closed or not,” she said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “It’s just one of thousands of rural newspapers around the country who are struggling to stay afloat and struggling to still serve their communities.”
According to the November 2023 report, the State of Local News, from the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University, nearly 2,900 newspapers across the country have closed since 2005, including more than 130 closings or mergers since 2022. The report says those closures have left residents in more than half of all U.S. counties with little to no access to reliable local news.
Filmed between 2017 and 2022, “For the Record” illustrates how important rural newspapers are to the areas they cover, while showing the changing landscape local newspapers have to operate in.
“Weekly rural newspapers are a very important part of the news ecosystem,” Courtney said. “I do think they help hold up democracy because they’re giving needed information to the town who otherwise would just have access to what they watch on cable television. I feel like local newspapers are the last line of defense for our democracy.”
Courtney said she initially talked to Brown to find out more about what’s happening at rural newspapers but ultimately decided that Brown and the Record were the story she was looking for.
Brown started working at the paper as a child, when her father was the editor. She took over when he passed away in 1993. After 30 years of running the paper, she said, keeping it afloat became increasingly difficult.
“There was a point where we had seven increases in our printing costs in one year – it went up 70%,” Brown said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “Our mailing costs were skyrocketing. Those are things you can’t budget for, and you can’t plan for. We were just struggling to keep up with the costs, and, of course, social media has a huge impact on advertising because everybody can advertise for free… I can’t compete with free advertising.”
Members of the community came forward to support the paper, she said, but it wasn’t enough. While several deals have come and gone, the paper has not sold, and Brown is still looking for someone to buy it. Brown said the decision to stop printing wasn’t an easy one, but keeping the paper open and printing was not something she was in a position to do by herself.
Across the country, groups have come together to create grants and initiatives to save local newspapers like the Record. For example, in September 2023, a group of non-partisan philanthropies launched a $500 million program for local journalism across the country over the next five years. Called “Press Forward,” the initiative has funding commitments from more than 20 groups including Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s The Archewell Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Ford Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Miami Foundation.
The initiative provides direct funding to newspapers through pooled funding and also works to connect local news organizations with direct grant funding from other organizations.
But those funding mechanisms can be too cumbersome for smaller papers, Brown said. As a one-person paper in a small, remote town, applying for funding and meeting funding criteria was a barrier she couldn’t overcome.
“It just became sort of overwhelming,” she said. “There were a lot of organizations cropping up (to help) and I spent hours and hours on the phone talking to people but somehow, one way or another, we failed to meet the criteria they needed to help us.”
And, it was more than just a matter of money, she said. Finding people to work at the paper was nearly impossible. That’s illustrated in the documentary. In the beginning, the paper has a staff of four. By the end, Brown is the only one still there.
But while the printing stopped, Brown has not.
When wildfires raced toward her hometown, Brown, who was heading to Austin to speak on a panel about the threats to democracy, got alerts that Canadian was being evacuated. Throughout her ride to the panel and then after it, she posted information to the paper’s website and Facebook page. For her, getting accurate information to the community was imperative.
It’s something she continues to do, heading to her office each day and reporting on Canadian. While the paper may not be printed anymore, Brown continues to post stories on the paper’s website and social media pages – obituaries, news and other things she considers her job to provide to Canadian.
“There have been elections. There were terrible wildfires here that devastated our county,” she said. “Every time I think I’ve got to stop, I need to start working on what I want to work on, something happens that I have to write about; that I have to cover. It’s just impossible to stop.”
“For the Record” is available on the PBS series Reel South starting May 6, 2024. Check local listings for dates and times. The documentary is also available to stream for free for three months at PBS, Reel South, or the PBS app.
This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.