'We've run the table this week,' rural editor-publisher writes after documentary premiere and tentative decision to close

The Canadian Record's front page this week; click to enlarge.

Has a newspaper ever been the subejct of a freshly premiered documentary and announced its plan to suspend publication, all in the same edition? Surely not, but that is the remarkable case of The Canadian Record in the Texas Panhandle, one of the best weeklies we know.

"We'll just call it what it is. This is the Navel-Gazing edition of The Canadian Record," Editor-Publisher Laurie Ezzell Brown says in her "Field Notes" column. "I’m not proud of that, but we have made the news, and we are determined to give The Record and its staff the same treatment we would any other newsmakers—good, bad and otherwise. Frankly, we’ve run the table this week."

The other news about the Record was a long-touted lawsuit filed against it and other local news media by the family of a high-school student who disappeared in 2016 and whose body was found three years later. Events in the case "have been accurately, fairly and thoroughly covered in these pages for over six years now," Ezzell Brown writes. "News of the lawsuit followed our difficult decision at midweek to walk away from the sale" of the paper, which has been in her family since 1947.

"That decision was preceded by a series of delayed contract signings and requests by the buyer for key changes to the contract, which we ultimately rejected. The outcome was both unexpected and quite frankly, a relief. The sale was not meant to be. However, it has left us in the difficult position of deciding what this newspaper’s ultimate fate will be. After three decades and counting under our ownership, we are 30 years older, 30 years wiser, and 30 years more tired. We cannot continue to work at the pace we have, or to shelve our personal lives to meet the demands of this community newspaper that we love. . . . At the risk of appearing to concede defeat, which we do not, my staff and I have agreed to suspend publication of The Record following our Thursday, March 9, edition. This will allow us time to notify our readers and subscribers and advertisers, to continue to seek a new owner for this newspaper, and to fight a toxic lawsuit meant to impugn the reputation of this newspaper and its publisher. We have arrived at this decision with great difficulty, having tried for at least the last two years to find someone who will take over this job. There is no way to adequately express our sadness in closing these doors. We can only assure you that we have chased every lead, walked down every dead end, and knocked on every door in an attempt to find an alternative to quitting."

In the documentary by Heather Courtney, "For the Record," filmed over the last five years, Ezzell Brown talks about those efforts – "Newspapers with small circulations in rural communities aren’t exactly the hot ticket;" Canadian has 2,649 people, Hemphill County 3,382 – the tribulations that preceded them, and possible outcomes: “No one else is gonna tell the stories that we’re tellin’, nobody . . . What happens if nobody’s doing this?”

The 37-minute film premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, Montana, Saturday. In the story about the premiere, Ezzell Brown says,  “For The Record feels like a very personal story about our lives and work here in Canadian, and that of my parents, Ben and Nancy Ezzell, who established such a strong legacy with this newspaper before us. It also conveys a more universal message, though, and one I hope many will hear and heed: that community newspapers like this one play an essential role in protecting and celebrating democracy from the ground up, in small rural towns that otherwise might have no voice, no visibility, and certainly no one holding public officials accountable for their decisions. Without strong community newspapers, we are risking the health and vitality of the rural communities they have nurtured and protected for so many decades.”