The end of The Canadian Record’s print edition — even if temporary — is another indication of how perilous the news business is for local publishers and the communities they’re a part of.
Laurie Ezzell Brown, at her desk on March 8, 2023, is the editor and publisher of the 130-year-old newspaper The Canadian Record, which serves a small town in the Texas Panhandle., The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
The only notice the paper provided its readers that the copy they held in their hands would be the last were a few paragraphs on the second page, where Brown often mused about the only town she has called home. In their wake are yawning news deserts that often lead to lower civic engagement, higher taxes and misinformation, according to research from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Already, Canadian civic leaders are wondering how they will keep the town’s 2,300 residents updated on looming issues such as a highway redesign, the upcoming beef show and who made the honor roll at the high school.
Now 70, Brown is determined to not die on the job as her father did in 1993 covering a football game. It’s closer to Oklahoma City than Dallas. Austin is a world and eighth-hour car ride away. So Canadians take care of themselves and pray state lawmakers don’t do anything to make it worse. Thanks to a few wealthy families, a local museum has hosted exhibits ranging from 20th-century Japanese woodblock prints to Pulitzer winner Rube Goldberg’s cartoons to early sketches by Rembrandt.
Ezzell had grown up in Texas’ cotton country. After returning from World War II, he refused to pick another piece of cotton. Instead, he would be a newspaperman. He found Canadian and The Record. After working alongside the owner as an apprentice and part owner, Ezzell bought the paper outright in 1948 with the help of a Missouri businessman.
Neither Brown nor her mother, who helped manage the office, had any formal training to put out a newspaper. Acutely aware of the responsibility that comes with the editorial page she had inherited, Brown set down a rule: Report first. She would never write an editorial about an issue she hadn’t fully covered in the news pages first.
“There is something that is unquantifiable that you lose,” he said. “You lose the central beam of the civic infrastructure. It connects everything to everything else. It gives people a safe neutral space in which to operate.” Brown tried to sell The Record and was close to a deal until it fell through during the final days of contract negotiations earlier this year, she said.
The signs, Brown said, now only serve to punish the town and its reputation. Who would want to stop for a burger or to fill up their gas tank in a town with a killer on the loose, let alone move there, Brown reasons. The county has seen influxes of transient oil and gas workers. As much as the city is defined by the Canadian River and the train tracks, it has been punctuated by boom and bust cycles. The only vestige of the last boom is the deserted and calcified trailer homes to one side of 2nd Street, which bisects the city.
Suzanne Bellsnyder purchased the Reporter-Statesman, founded in 1907, last fall. Bellsynder, 50, bought the paper after spending two decades in Austin working at the Capitol. She returned to her hometown in the Panhandle in 2014 to help her aging parents. “Entrepreneurialism is what’s going to save rural Texas,” she said. “It’s what created it. And it’s what will save it.”The Record’s office smells like a newsroom should. The scent of old paper and musk hits you as you walk in from off the street. The air is full of adrenaline and irreverence.
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