'We often stopped bad things from happening . . . not because we're so powerful. Information is powerful.'

Canadian Record Publisher Laurie Ezell Brown talked with Judy Woodruff of PBS. (PBS image)

By Al Cross

Director and Professor, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, University of Kentucky

One of the best broadcast reports about the struggles of rural news media appeared Wednesday night on the PBS NewsHour, as senior correspondent Judy Woodruff used The Canadian Record of Texas as her object example. The 13½-minute story provided an update on Publisher Laurie Ezzell Brown's efforts to keep the paper alive after she stopped printing in March, but more importantly, it delivered some deep, often personal insights into the value of reliable local news.

On its website and Facebook, the Record "is a shell of what it was . . . something residents say had held them together through good times and bad," Woodruff reports. Brown told Woodruff, "We're sort of checking that pulse, I think, trying to decide what's the best way to communcate. That said, it's not a great revenue model, and I've got people working here who are not getting paychecks right now. I'm not getting a paycheck."

But as Brown keeps looking for a new owner, doing local journalism is no longer about making money, if it ever was: "Information is the key to our democracy: facts, truth, good information. And also just that conversation that we, I think, enable. It's essential. So I worry all the time about it. I want deeply to continue the life of The Canadian Record. I am just not sure how to do it."

The story doesn't mention the Record's investigative reporting that has won it awards, other than this quote from Brown: "We have sometimes helped good things happen and we often stopped bad things from happening. And it's not because we're so powerful. It's because information is powerful."

The testimonials of the newspaper's readers say, explicitly and implicitly, what has been lost. Rancher Steve Rader told Woodruff, "It's almost like a death in the family. We don't talk about it a lot. . . . They celebrated our successes and our tough times." Rader choked up as he said that, then told Woodruff that he didn't always agree with Brown's editorials, but "She always made me think. . . . We need to have other opinions. That's our strength of America. Thank God for that."

City Council Member Wendie Cook noted that Canadian, population 2,300, is about to have a referendum on a bond issue, and "I have a concern about who is telling the critical pieces of information. . . . Without The Canadian Record, I fear that our voter information is coming from our stuffed mailboxes, from candidates or from PACs, who by their very nature are providing biased material."

Water-well driller John Julian put the lie to the notion that in a county of 3,400 people, everyone knows everyone else: "If there's a name pops up on the ballot for one of the elections, and you don't know them, you really don't have a means of finding out. . . . I don't like to be in that position. If I make a vote, I want it to be an informed, educated vote." He said that Hemphill County, without the Record, "It's just got kind of a hole in it, kind of a vacancy right now."

Woodruff got national perspective from Johanna Dunaway, director of the Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship at Syracuse University, who told her, "Local news is sort of what reminds people what they have in common, both their challenges and their shared identities, their shared culture, their shared community."

Brown said at last month's National Summit on Journalism in Rural America that she doesn't really like Facebook, but "We've gotten more and more requests from businesses to advertise, to put ads on our web page and Facebook page, because they see the traffic it's getting," and the limited publication is filling a need: "Things happen. There have been storms here and tornadoes and events like that that you just can't ignore. They're happening. We need to cover them. People look to us for information."

The Record published its annual high-school graduation edition, with photos of graduates, as a PDF. But news comes in "shorter stories, less artfully written, with sparser detail," Brown said. "Our reach grows daily and kind of startlingly, but we turn out news with less substance and with far less satisfaction." She said residents are "getting the essential news. What they're not getting is the heart and soul of a newspaper, and they miss it, and I don't know how to fill that void right now." Brown said at the June 7 summit that she had written only one online-only editorial, soon after she stopped printing, and "I have some things to say. We also find that we're pretty busy just cobbling together the news right now." For more on the Record, click here.