Journalists at rural Alaska newspapers quit over abrupt corporate edits to Kirk story that upset a state politician

Photo by Mark Sabbatini, Juneau Independent

Four journalists resigned from newspapers in rural Alaska after the publications’ corporate owner made "significant edits to an article about Charlie Kirk’s death, appearing to yield to pressure from a Republican state lawmaker who had criticized the coverage," reports Neil Vigdor of The New York Times.

The journalists who worked for The Homer News, The Peninsula Clarion and The Juneau Empire, were all employed by Alabama-based Carpenter Media. The news staff issued a joint resignation letter, noting that they had not been consulted about the edits, and that without editorial independence, the company's integrity as a news source was compromised.

The story at issue "chronicled a Sept. 17 vigil in Homer, Alaska, for Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder and a right-wing ally of President Trump’s who was fatally shot while speaking at Utah Valley University," Vigdor writes. In its second paragraph, the story "described Kirk as a a 'Christian-Nationalist icon' and defender of 'often racist and controversial views.'"

One of the vigil's organizers, Sarah Vance, a Republican state representative, took issue with the description of Kirk and wrote to the paper's corporate owners and "suggested that advertisers were planning to boycott the publications," Vigdor adds. The story then disappeared from online, only to reappear with numerous edits a few hours later.

In a statement, Carpenter Media Group said it altered the story because it did not meet company standards. Gregory Knight, an aide to Vance, "provided a statement from Vance saying that she did not expect her complaint to contribute to the resignations," Vigdor reports.

Rural Texas legislators who opposed governor's push for school vouchers fall to big-spending campaign against them

Texas House roll call board (Texas Tribune/Eddie Gasper)

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and his Republican allies succeeded in purging at least seven members from the state House in Tuesday's primary elections. Their main targets were rural Republicans who helped defeat Abbott's legislation that would have provided taxpayer support for private education. Now the House will "become more receptive to school vouchers," report Zach Despart and Renzo Downey of the Texas Tribune. But "It was not clear on Tuesday if that effort had paid off," writes David Goodman, Texas bureau chief of The New York Times. Some race are in runoffs.

Abbott's campaign was funded by huge contributions from right-wing interests inside Texas and out of it. Former president Donald Trump and Lt. Gov, Dan Patrick "endorsed challengers in dozens of races citing the incumbents’ disloyalty to the party," the Tribune reports.

The anti-voucher incumbents were targets of heavy advertising that put them in "Wanted" posters and called them "liberals" but rarely if ever mentioned the school issue. One of them, Rep. Glenn Rogers, said in a column in The Community News of Aledo that "Abbott has defiled the Office of Governor by creating and repeating blatant lies about me and my House colleagues, those who took a stand for our public schools. I stood by the governor on all his legislative priorities but just one, school vouchers. For just one disagreement, and for a $6 million check from Jeff Yass, a Pennsylvanian TikTok investor, and voucher vendor, Abbott went scorched earth against rural Texas and the representatives who did their jobs -- representing their districts."

Before the election, The Community News published an interview with Rogers, and said it had twice given opponent Michael Olcott the same opportunity but received no response. The weekly didn't endorse in the race, but in a Feb. 21 column, Editor-Publisher Randy Keck said anti-Rogers mailers lied about his voting record. "You may be reading this thinking I am advocating to vote for Rogers, but I’m not," he wrote. "You should vote based on who you think would best represent you in the Texas House of Representatives. But you should not vote based on the character assassination of a good man."

Call for proposals focusing on 'Strengthening Community News' from Intl. Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors

The International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors is accepting proposals for its 2024 ISWNE/Huck Boyd Competition focused on “Strengthening Community News.” Proposals should provide "insight and guidance on general issues and/or everyday problems that confront community newspapers and their newsrooms, with particular reference to weekly general-interest publications with circulations under 10,000." Proposal submissions are due via email on Nov. 2. 

This competition builds on the Huck Boyd Center’s former “Newspapers and Community-Building Symposium,” co-sponsored for 20 years by the National Newspaper Association and its foundation. According to information from ISWNE and the Huck Boyd Center, "the competition’s ultimate goal is to engage academicians and community newspaper journalists in productive conversations about community journalism.”

ISWNE hotline access is available for society members and non-members. Non-members may request temporary access by contacting Executive Director Chad Stebbins at stebbins-c@mssu.edu. Hotline discussions feature topics of interest to weekly newsrooms and could be used to focus potential proposals.

Possible topics "could include legal, political, or ethical issues; alternative print/digital integration models; or surveys to determine successful techniques for staff recruitment/retention, for boosting online presence, or to elicit best practices for special editions," according to the ISWNE and Huck Boyd Center information. 

One paper will be selected by a panel of working and retired community journalists for presentation at the 2024 ISWNE conference scheduled for June or July 2024 in Toronto, Canada.  ISWNE and the ISWNE Foundation will provide the author with a complementary conference registration and a partial subsidy for travel. 

'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.

Uvalde Leader-News Publisher Craig Garnett wins Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism

Uvalde Leader-News Publisher Craig Garnett (OPA photo)

Craig Garnett, publisher of the Uvalde Leader-News in southwest Texas, is the winner of the 2023 Tom and Pat Gish Award presented by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky.

Garnett owns the twice-weekly newspaper that continues to cover, and contend with, the aftermath of the May 2022 school shooting in which 19 children and two teachers died.

“The award recognizes not only Craig’s courageous coverage and commentary about the tragedy, but his longtime willingness to tell hard truths about things that matter in Uvalde County,” said Al Cross, director of the Institute and extension professor of journalism.

Tom and Pat Gish

The award is named for the couple who published The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Kentucky, for more than 50 years. Their son and successor, Ben Gish, is on the award selection committee. He said of Garnett and the Leader-News, “It’s one thing to read national news accounts about law enforcement not moving quickly enough to save the lives of many of the victims, but it’s entirely something else to read the local newspaper’s far deeper accounts of that continuing controversy. . . . The Leader-News does not hesitate when it comes to letting family members of the victims have their say, nor does it shy away from printing the responses of those whose actions, or lack thereof, are being questioned.”

In a column shortly after the shooting, Garnett wrote that a regional police official "could not answer why it took an hour to end the attack" and quoted him: "It is a complex situation. They are measuring; they are measuring." He wrote, "The question is how much measuring is permissible, while children are being murdered. Or perhaps they were already gone. It pains to write these words of criticism about law enforcement, but parents and the community have the right to know. They must be told why police, whom parents at the scene begged to go in and save their children, failed to act. They have to know, to ever begin to heal."

He concluded, "There is a final question that no one will ever adequately answer. It came on Thursday in the form of a text message from our reporter, Kimberly Rubio, whose fourth-grader Lexi did not come home that day: 'Why would someone hurt my baby, Craig?'"

Rubio, now in the newspaper’s advertising department, praised Garnett for the paper’s family atmosphere and encouraging environment: “He is gifted in seeing a person’s potential. He is a teacher, able to guide us as we harness that potential. He believes in us, and we learn to believe in ourselves. I have the same faith in him and his writing staff.”

Garnett spent hours “sitting with families who lost children, siblings, friends; interviewing survivors, teachers and students, about their experience,” Leader-News Managing Editor Meghann Garcia said in nominating him. She said he has made a “dogged pursuit to learn how so many things went wrong that day, how every single fail-safe failed. . . . He has done all of this without a break from the office, from the work.”

In an editorial a month after the shooting, Garnett named names and was blunt: “No mass school shooting in the United States has ended with such glaring failures in both the law enforcement response and school district security. . . . Neither [school] Police Chief Pete Arredondo, acting city chief Mariano Pargas, Uvalde County Sheriff Ruben Nolasco nor any state or federal officer among the 376 responders to the scene was willing to take the helm of what was clearly a rudderless ship cast into a hurricane.”

A week later, another Garnett piece endorsing more gun control concluded: “I am not about to surrender my guns, and they are many, but I challenge you to give me one good reason (and please not the “slippery slope” argument that did not come to pass when assault weapons were banned) why a teenager should have the firepower to stand down 376 lawmen. If disturbed young men are going to commit horrific crimes with firearms, why not take the most devastating amplifier out of the mass shooting equation?”

Uvalde County (Wikipedia map)

Criticism of local law enforcement and support for more gun control didn’t sit well with some people in the town of 15,000 and county of 25,000. Garnett said at a meeting of the newspaper association in Oklahoma, his native state, that by the end of the day of the shooting, “The school and police agencies that the newspaper had a good relationship with all clammed up. A year later we still can’t get answers. We have filed about 10 to 15 requests with the school district and still can’t get any answers.”

Garcia began her nomination of Garnett with the story of a call from a reader who objected to a picture of “a local pediatrician, outspoken in the shooting aftermath, at the White House, in a commanding photo with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.” The caller said Garnett had “better not acknowledge Biden's presidency again if he wanted to keep the caller's subscription,” Garcia wrote. “The call was mild compared to what the newspaper staff had fielded over previous weeks . . . . Craig immediately turned to his typewriter to work on a subscription refund check and your-wish-is-now-granted letter.”

Garcia continued, “It wasn't the first time our coverage, or Craig's politics, went against the grain.” Garnett had editorialized against the Iraq War, and opposed “a water pipeline that would take local water, dearly needed for agriculture, a mainstay of the area economy, and funnel it to San Antonio,” she wrote. And four years before the shooting, he opposed the idea of a separate school police force, which botched the response to the shooting. The next year, the paper a guest-written series of stories about the local Ku Klux Klan chapter of 100 years before.

“Craig has never been afraid of taking a stand or telling the news, despite how unpopular it might be with subscribers and advertisers, who are also often his friends,” Garcia wrote. And he has used his own family’s troubling experience as an example to give hope to others.

His wife, Melissa Garnett, told the Gish Award selection committee, “One of his best columns was about our son’s process of recovery from drugs and alcohol. That took courage. He must have hit all the right notes, as the response was great – he had taken the bold step of using his pain of an addicted child to remove the stigma of talking about addiction.”

The column celebrated their son’s year-plus of sobriety and concluded, “Far too many addicts today, especially those in thrall to opioids, don’t get Logan’s chance at recovery. The steps that will lead them from a world of pain and failure remain stubbornly distant and daily receding until hope is lost. We should do all we can to help them discover a path because inside every addict lives someone’s treasured child, father, husband, brother or friend.”

Garnett “and his paper have been a continuing source of strength in that community and beyond,” said selection committee member Bill Bishop, founding editor of The Daily Yonder, a national rural-news publication and a former weekly editor in Bastrop, Texas, and columnist for the Austin American-Statesman.

Garnett, who earned an economics degree from Southern Methodist University, joined the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1977, moved to the Kansas City Star in 1978, became general manager of the Leader-News in 1982 and owner and publisher in 1989. Under his ownership, the newspaper has won many awards.

“I am extremely honored to receive the Gish Award,” Garnett said. “And I am deeply humbled by the support from coworkers and friends in the industry who thought my work worthy of such recognition.”

The Institute for Rural Journalism (publisher of The Rural Blog) will present the Gish Award to Craig Garnett in Texas, at a time and place to be determined. UPDATE, Dec. 17: The award will be presented Feb. 29 at the University of Texas during a symposium, "Courage, Tenacity, Integrity and Innovation in Rural Journalism," sponsored by the Institute, the Texas Center for Community Journalism at Tarleton State University and The Center for Ethical Leadership in Media in the UT School of Journalism and Media.

Garnett will be recognized Oct. 26 in Lexington, Ky., at the Institute’s annual Al Smith Awards Dinner, with USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page as the keynote speaker. At that event, Ben Gish and Mountain Eagle reporter Sam Adams will receive the Al Smith Award for public service through community journalism by Kentuckians.

Warren Wheat, who showed how and why small daily newspapers can make political endorsements, dies at 83

Warren Wheat, who helped start USA Today and ended his career as editor of a small daily newspaper that took the unusual step of endorsing candidates in almost every local election, died Sunday in Lexington, Ky. He was 83.

He retired as editor of The News-Enterprise in Elizabethtown, Ky., in 2009 after 55 years as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Kentucky, Ohio, Washington, D.C., and South Carolina. He was Columbus bureau chief for The Cincinnati Enquirer, worked in the Enquirer's and Gannett News Service's Washington bureaus, and was part of the initial team that launched USA Today in 1982, serving as deputy Washington editor and later reader editor for the editorial page. He was governance and national editor at The State in Columbia, S.C., before becoming editor in Elizabethtown in 2002.

The page on which Wheat began election endorsements; click to enlarge

Soon after he arrived, Wheat concluded that the newspaper should make endorsements in local elections, because growth in Hardin County had limited citizens' personal contact with candidates and created more partisan competition. He told readers, “It would be a lot more comfortable to avoid controversy by sitting on the sidelines during this election season. But members of the editorial board felt it is this newspaper’s duty and responsibility to fulfill its role as a voice in the community we serve by providing leadership and guidance for our readers.” The News-Enterprise gradually expanded the number of races in which it made endorsements, including even those with small constituencies, such as school-board member. But as its staff shrank after he left, it was less able to do that, and finally stopped.

A brief service for Wheat will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday, July 29, at First United Methodist Church in downtown Lexington. Pictures will be on display at 10:30 a.m. The family requests that instead of flowers, donations be made to the scholarship established in Wheat's honor at the journalism school of his alma mater, the University of Kentucky, at this site, or by checks to College of Communication and Information, Attn: Director of Philanthropy, 308 Lucille Little Library, Lexington KY 40506.

New to the trade, Jeremy Gulban has more former Gannett papers than anyone; he says success is up to communities

By Al Cross

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

The owner of dozens of "ghost newspapers" bought from Gannett Co. says he is trying to revive them by returning editorial decision-making to local people while still taking advantage of the economies of scale that have led to consolidation of newspaper ownership. But he says his new chain's fate is not in its own hands.

"The success or failure of these rural newspapers is on the local people," CherryRoad Media CEO Jeremy Gulban said Friday at the National Summit on Journalism in Rural America, sponsored by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, publisher of The Rural Blog. His remark fit the Summit's research question: "How do rural communities sustain local journalism that supports democracy?"

One example of a community sustaining rural journalism was the first paper Gulban started, the Rainy Lake Gazette in International Falls, where the paper had closed, and he reached out to the local Chamber of Commerce because he had recently bought his first paper in Grand Marais, also in northern Minnesota. "They got a whole bunch of different stakeholders in town, and we all met, and it was really kind of an amazing meeting for me, because I had never seen that kind of enthusiasm, that kind of spirit, to solve a problem," Gulban said. Three weeks later, they had a paper. "People really embraced it," he said. "We quickly got to more subscribers than, you know, the old paper had."

CherryRoad Media map, adapted by The Rural Blog

That brought the information-technology entrepreneur to the attention of the nation's biggest newspaper company, which is trying to unload small papers that add little, if anything, to its bottom line. "Gannett was looking for an organization that was strong enough technically to be able to do these migrations that would have to happen, and probably blissfully ignorant enough to take on this challenge of selling their worst papers, basically. So we took the leap." Now his company, less than three years old, has 77 papers in 17 states, more than 50 of them former Gannett papers, and many of them "ghost newspapers," he said.

Making the papers substantial and sustainable began with returning control to local people. "When we took over, the editors would say, ‘We send in a few articles, and we don't see the paper until it winds up coming to the office after it's printed.’ . . . I think the biggest thing that that happened is they eliminated all the local publishers, so there is no one ... you can call to talk about the paper. There's literally no one. Everything flows up in these vertical silos, which leads to a lack of integration, a lack of working together. And, as you all know, you can't have your salespeople off doing one thing and editorial people doing another. There's got to be that collaboration which, you know, really doesn't exist. . . . If people want to place an ad. They'll call an 800 number, and they'll go online and do it. And we all know in small towns that won't happen."

The downward spiral of news, ads and circulation has left ghost papers with two kinds of subscribers and regular single-copy buyers, Gulban said: "People who just like the ritual of getting the paper and really don't care what's in it ... and people who hold a position in town where they feel like they need to get the paper. . . . People who were truly looking for news had just given up and kind of moved on."

That caused most retail advertising to vanish, and "dependence on legal [ads] and obituaries," Gulban said. "When we looked at at these financials, the revenue from obits, legal and classified, was nearly double the display advertising in a lot of cases, you know, which is totally upside down. . . . So really, what you have is you got a ghost newspaper, right? It really has no relevance in the community. And you know that's a vicious cycle, right? The the less relevant it is. So. This is kind of the cycle that we found most of these papers to be in."

In addition to returning editorial control, "We tried to take out all of the regional or national content that was being put in there primarily as filler," Gulban said. "We still have some national content in some of the more-than-once-a-week frequencies. But anything weekly really has nothing but local content in it. We invested more in editorial positions. . . . We've actually been able to find someone in every one of those markets which has not been easy."

Jeremy Gulban

On the business side, "We've really tried to make sure we have a local ad rep in every market, with some success," he said. "That's not an easy position to hire for, particularly if you've got a tough product that you're trying to sell into. So we've had a hard time getting people. . . . Our biggest source of talent, believe it or not, is just people who used to work at the paper, and see that it's improved and want to come back." As staffs are rebuilt, Gulban said, "some people are going to step up and be leaders in this. And some people aren't. And so there's a direct correlation between the leadership ability of the local usually editor, sometimes the salesperson."

But local has its limits. Local ad and page designers are "a luxury that we can't afford," Gulban said. "And we've built our own circulation platform. That's entirely web-based so that we can have people in different locations serve circulation needs across markets." All printing is outsourced, but he said the company might build a plant because so many are closing: "We do believe that a printed product has to be part of the long-term solution" to the problems of local papers.

One way to define a ghost newspaper is that it has no local office open to the public, or is open only a few hours a week: "That just leads to no community goodwill efforts, no sponsoring events, no joining the Rotary Club, none of that," Gulban said. "That's so essential in a small-town newspaper." But not so essential that he has offices in some small markets. In Stephenville, Texas, rent was too high, so "We're trying to pioneer like a shared office, you know, with a Chamber of Commerce, maybe even a local restaurant, you know, we're open for lunch. Three days a week we go in there, the editor's there, the circulation person's there, you can go meet with them. We're trying to be as creative as possible just to keep that physical real estate cost down." The Google listing for the Stephenville Empire-Tribune says it's "temporarily closed."

Sites of two of the Texas papers discussed (Google map)

Just east of Stephenville on US 67 south of Fort Worth, the Glen Rose Reporter serves a town of 900 people with 320 print subscribers, "which was under 200 when we took over, and 108 digital subscribers, which was zero because there was no paywall," Gulban said. "This paper was absolutely horrible. It had literally nothing in it. When we took over, two really dedicated freelancers stepped up and said, 'We will make this paper be successful, and so they produce all the content between the two of them. They take it upon themselves to go around town, try to get people to advertise, try to drive additional subscribers. . . . This is so much better of a paper than it was a year ago, and the results show. And while those numbers are small, in percentage-increase terms, they're really huge. . . . Truthfully, if we didn't take this paper over, it wouldn't be there anymore, because the markets, too small for anybody to really be interested in doing anything here."

Gulban's other example was the Hamburg Reporter, in Iowa's southeast corner. Fremont County "had a catastrophic flood in 2019 and basically half the town's population left, so the population is now 890. We have 132 print subscribers and two digital, but we just put the paywall up two weeks ago," Gulban said. But its ad revenue averages $9,200 a month, and "this is the best revenue per population of anything in our whole organization." The paper's mothership is the Nebraska City News-Press, across the Missouri River; the one person "who was basically doing everything" died last month, "so we have to figure out how to handle that. But the model here still holds. . . . We have one person who is about town, knows everybody, is able to do a lot of different things," Gulban said. Our vision, which is a little bit out there, is: If you want to advertise in Hamburg, Iowa, we're the place you should be doing it through, not through Facebook, not through any other technical solution. Because we know Hamburg, Iowa. . . . We want to leverage our local staffs and their credibility to drive revenue in this new digital world."

And America's newest newspaper-chain owner had one broad thing to say about consolidation of newspaper ownership: "I believe strongly in distributed ownership of the news, because I don't think the country is founded on the idea that three or four groups or people would control all the information. The vision was thousands of individual people controlling the flow of information."

Gulban was the concluding speaker at the Summit's morning session. The video is here.

This story has been edited to give the correct genesis of Gulban's paper in International Falls.

Uvalde weekly's editor-publisher wins Texas Press Assn. award for community leadership, the latest in a long line

Craig Garnett (Oklahoma Press Association photo)

Craig Garnett, editor and publisher of the Uvalde Leader-News, received the Texas Press Association's Frank W. Mayborn Award for Community Leadership at the group's recent convention. He was cited for the twice-weekly's coverage of the school shooting that left 19 students and two teachers dead, and its aftermath, the Texas Press Messenger reports. Incoming TPA President Ken Esten Cooke writes, "The entire staff . . . showed bravery and tenacity through a horrible community tragedy."

"On May 24, 2022, we got an assignment we never expected and we never wanted," Garnett told his colleagues. He told college students in an Dow Jones News Fund editing program at the University of Texas, "If we hadn't been a family, we wouldn't have survived the past year."

Garnett earned an economics degree from Southern Methodist University in 1975, joined the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1977 and moved to the Kansas City Star in 1978. He became general manager of the Leader-News in 1982 and owner and publisher in 1989.

"Garnett and the newspaper have won countless regional and state press awards," the Messenger reports. "The Leader-News took home sweepstakes honors in the 2022 Texas Better Newspaper Contest." Its latest award was for Best Editorial in the National Newspaper Association contest.

Oregon editor wins weekly editors' top writing award; other winners' topics include secrecy, guns, books, Covid, racism

Steve Bagwell

Steve Bagwell, editorial-page editor of The News-Register in McMinnville, Oregon, won the 2023 Golden Quill Award for editorial writing from the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, which held its annual conference at the University of Nevada, Reno, last week.

Bagwell's editorial hoisted Yamhill County Commissioner Lindsay Berschauer by her own petard: words she used to get elected in 2020, promising to make “helping working families” and “protecting working-class families” her top priorities. She and her mentor on the three-member commission, Mary Starrett, refused to accept $68,644 from the state for substance-abuse prevention, rural health care and vaccinations, objecting to a standard clause that "commits Oregon counties to supporting life- and health-saving vaccinations, most of which target dangerous diseases like polio and diphtheria," Bagwell wrote. "The counties are left to decide for themselves how deeply that commitment needs to run."

Immunization services "would seem to most benefit working-class families from rural areas where private health services may not be as affordable and accessible," Bagwell wrote. "But Berschauer and Starrett have displayed almost cult-like devotion to the unorthodox beliefs of the far-right fringe, leading them to repeatedly honor personal ideological purity over the broader interests of ordinary citizens. . . . We take vehement exception to their repeated efforts to impose their alarmist screeds on the rest of us, particularly when those views lack any vestige of factual or scientific grounding. We find it even more objectionable when they prove willing to incur materially harmful collateral damage on their self-proclaimed rural working-class constituency in the process, by thwarting aid having nothing to do with immunization against communicable disease.

To close the editorial, Bagwell quoted a post-election statement from Bershauer: “Too often, those in government operate in a bubble. They fail to understand the impact of their decisions on working families, and that erodes taxpayer trust.” He concluded, “Well, we certainly have to agree with her there. We couldn’t have said it better.”

Bagwell headed the "Golden Dozen" of editorial awards from ISWNE. Two of the 11 others won for editorials about government secrecy. Outgoing ISWNE President Gordon Cameron, group managing editor of the Ancaster News in Hamilton, Ontario, won for an editorial lampooning a local school board for keepign secret why it had sanctioned a trustee for the thid time in the current term; and Bill Schanen III of the Ozaukee Press in Port Washington, Wis., for an editorial taking the city council to task for keeping secret the identity of a developer who was making a controversial proposal.

Other winners in the Golden Dozen and their topics, in alphabetical order, were:

• Tamara Botting of The Sachem in Hamilton, Ontario, who held the local health department accountable with a deeply reported column about how and why it had given her the wrong information about self-isolation after she was exposed to a person with Covid: "People could have been putting off getting tested ... because of misinformation."
• Melissa Hale-Spencer of The Altamont Enterprise in New York, for a long piece about the history of racism in local schools, prompted by the latest incident, ending with "an appeal toward healing. This is empathetic local journalism at its best," wrote the judge, KUNR Manager Brian Duggan, former executive editor of the Reno Gazette-Journal.
• Molly McRoberts of the Potter County News in Gettysburg, S.D., for a short editorial about the Texas school shooting, with this line: "There’s talk after these shootings happen, but rarely change. Some say it’s a mental-health issue. Others say it’s a gun-accessibility issue. It looks like there’s a chance it could be both. And again, it does seem like there could be some discussion."
• Leonard Sparks of The Highland Current in Cold Spring, New York, for a piece titled "The Covid shrug," reflecting on how the pandemic had changed him, his neighbors and their attitudes, and how it had entered a new phase with vaccines that prevent hospitalization for the disease.
• Lisha Van Nieuwenhove of The Uxbridge Cosmos in Ontario, for an editorial titled "Share the freakin' road," about the need to be patient with farming equipment at harvest time, sparked by an accident in front of her husband's family farm.
• Alan Wartes of the Gunnison Country Times in Colorado, for an editorial about citizen's plea to move a sexually themed book from the young-adult section of the libary to the adult section, and the reaction. "Book banning is a bad idea. Period," he wrote. "But so is attacking the motives and character of someone who simply sees an issue differently than you do with harsh and unfounded rhetoric."
• Peter Weinschenk of The Record-Review in Abbotsford, Wis., for an editorial driving home the findings of the newspaper's investigation of the Marathon County court system, which found that the courts are overwhelmed by poor people largely arrested by Wausau police "and without enough public defenders to represent them. . . . Let us drive on slushy, potholed roads. Let us check out ragged, old books from the library. Let our park buildings go unpainted. Let zoning requests gather dust. But don’t make us live without justice. That is the bedrock of our civilization and should be our first priority."
• Brian Wilson, news editor of The Star News in Medford, Wis., for a column urging readers to look past the sensational murder of a 10-year-old girl and think about the need for mental-health services that may have prevented it.
• Geoffrey Woehlk, news editor of The Maryville Forum in Missouri, for a column admonishing local citizens who harshly criticize public officials at meetings: "Why do school board members even want to be school board members? Who would want to be a superintendent? Or a tourism committee member? Or a city manager? Or a teacher? Why subject yourself to the abuse?"

Weekly editors give Minnesota's Reed Anfinson top award; Oregon's Bagwell has top editorial; 11 other writers honored

Reed Anfinson

Reed Anfinson, a longtime leader in rural journalism and community newspapers, won the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors' top prize, the Eugene Cervi Award, at the group's annual conference in Reno, Nevada, Saturday night.

Steve Bagwell of The News-Register in McMinnville, Oregon, won ISWNE's Golden Quill for editorial writing; he and 11 other weekly editors were in the group's Golden Dozen for editorials. Those are detailed on The Rural Blog tomorrow.

The Cervi Award, named for the crusading editor of the old Rocky Mountain Journal, recognizes an editor who consistently acts with the conviction that “good journalism begets good government,” with consistently aggressive reporting of local government, and has had a career of outstanding public service through community journalism that adhered to the highest standards of the craft, with the deep reverence for the English language that was the hallmark of Cervi’s writing.

Anfinson is co-owner of the Swift County Monitor-News in Benson, Minn., The Stevens County Times in Morris, Minn.; and the Grant County Herald in Elbow Lake, Minn., and partner in a printing plant. After graduation from the University of Minnesota, he worked for the Minnesota House and a congressional campaign, returning to Benson as Monitor-News editor in 1978. In 1996, he bought his brother's half-interest and became sole owner. He and his wife, Shelly, purchased the Grant County Herald in 2014 and the Stevens County Times in 2019. He  served as president of the Minnesota Newspaper Association and the National Newspaper Association, the main lobby for rural newspapers, and is again on the NNA board. He won NNA's 2019 James O. Amos Award for a career of distinguished service and leadership to the community press and the newspaper’s community, the 2003 Al McIntosh Distinguished Service to Journalism Award, MPA's highest honor; and First Amendment awards from the Minnesota Coalition on Government Information and St. Cloud State University. He was vice president of the old Minnesota News Council and is research chair of the Minnesota Center for Rural Policy and Development, which does research on the challenges of rural Minnesota. He has served on local economic-development groups and continues to cover city, county, school and hospital meetings, as well as laying out pages and writing columns.

Anfinson was nominated by MPA Executive Director Lisa Hills, who wrote, "Reed exemplifies the best in journalism and serves as an inspiration to others. . . . He is recognized as a respected expert and spokesman for community journalism, often appearing on public television or being interviewed by reporters for stories regarding community newspapers [but] his main focus has always been, covering and informing readers about their local government bodies and community."

Former NNA president Robert Williams seconded: "Reed’s valor in standing up to the money and power that controls many small towns proves his commitment to the values so many journalists, like Eugene Cervi, stood for. I know of no other editor who better deserves an award representing the worthwhile goals Mr. Cervi sought to achieve. Our nation would be in far better shape if every community could be so fortunate to have an editor with the wisdom, vision and ideals Reed Anfinson demonstrates through his newspaper every week."

Benson Mayor Jack Evenson wrote that Anfinson "upholds journalistic excellence" and "strives to ensure that this area engages in fact-based, researched debate rather than what is popular or learned through hearsay. . . . The effort he puts into every issue is evidenced through the sheer number of stories and their high quality when compared to other small-town papers."

Anfinson clearly has done a good job of helping local officials understand the role of a community paper. He recalls how longtime city manager Rob Wolfington, now retired, concluded a list of introductions at a City Council meeting, looking across four rows of empty chairs at him and saying, "And the newspaper, representing the people of Benson."

In upstate N.Y., people favor solar power but see influx of solar farms as another case of downstate domination

This photo of a solar farm accompanied The Altamont Enterprise's story about the study.

"Upstate New Yorkers, who are otherwise broadly in favor of renewable energy development," oppose utility-scale solar developments in their own communities, reports Noah Zweifel of The Altamont Enterprise, citing a study by the state's Cornell University. The study was published in the journal Rural Sociology.

A survey of more than 400 Upstate residents found that "The factors most correlated with stance on solar development were those that related in some way to sense of place, such as how secure people felt in their own community, how strongly they identify with an upstate point-of-view, and whether they feel their area can compete fairly against other areas for its own interests," Zweifel reports. "In other words, people — in this case mostly older, politically moderate, rural residents — were most reactive to a sense that upstate New York wasn’t getting a fair shake, and that the proliferation of solar facilities in their area is yet another example of upstaters shouldering the burden of downstaters’ needs."

The award-winning Albany County weekly followed up last week with an editorial headlined "Urban and rural: We are one state and must find common ground." After noting the long history of conflicts between Upstate and New York City, it notes, "There is little local benefit from utility-scale solar facilities as they are designed to feed directly into a centralized grid, rather than being redistributed locally to lower local energy bills. The usual benefit a municipality receives from a utility — through tax payments — is circumvented for solar facilities because the state, wanting to encourage solar, has lifted that requirement, letting developers pay far less in payments in lieu of taxes." But the editorial points out that some local governments have required "full tax payments, as they would for any other facility. Further, and more importantly, municipalities can gauge the desires of their own residents to see what resources — whether it be rich farmland or scenic vistas — are commonly viewed as worth preserving and zone accordingly, thus dictating the most suitable places for solar facilities to be built."

Iowa editor reminds pork producers: 'The customer comes first' and Calif. voters say sows need room to turn around

By Art Cullen
Storm Lake (Iowa) Times Pilot

The U.S. Supreme Court cut sows some slack last week, which caused a lot of squealing around Iowa where we forget that the customer comes first.

The high court on a 5-4 vote last Thursday upheld Proposition 12, a 2018 California ballot initiative that drew 63% voter support, demanding that gestating sows be allowed room to turn around. Prop. 12 also called for cage-free poultry production and more space for veal calves.

The lawsuit was brought by the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Pork Producers Council of Ankeny. They said they would evaluate their next steps.

Next steps should be getting with the program and responding to consumer concerns. . . . The poultry industry largely adapted to cage-free production years ago when McDonald’s demanded it based on consumer preference. The pork industry failed to heed the warnings and chose instead to fight the will of the people of California.

Art Cullen

Iowa is the leading purveyor of pork in the giant California market. The pork complex generally claims the costs of 24-foot gestation stalls will be catastrophic. Meatpackers were somewhat restrained. Hormel, for one, reported that complying with California production standards will have no material effect on the company’s bottom line. Tyson said it will comply.

The California electorate is not 63% liberal. It is a bellwether because of the sheer size of the Golden State economy. Voters were well aware potentially higher pork costs, and they were equally cognizant of threats to animal and human health from piling more livestock on top of more livestock.

Iowans are similarly aware, consistently voting for cleaner water while being rebuffed by legislators and agri-industry. The legislature continues to pass "ag gag" laws because they don’t like the picture of hogs jammed into confinement. They know what their nose tells them — that this is about enough, already. Yet more hogs keep coming.

The court’s ruling will require retrofitting of old sow facilities and will reduce throughput at the margins. It will not put swine feeders on the rocks. It will force the industry to change with consumer demand. We were told that we needed consistent, lean hogs of a certain structure because of consumer taste, when in fact it was to standardize the carcass for more efficient processing.

This is real consumer action at the ballot box. The court challenges the notion that the livestock industry can sneer at regulations and rationalize its excesses.

Not a single independent pork producer will be affected. Whatever is left of them. They did not depend on locking a sow down. They performed husbandry in the farrowing house. That costs more. Lord forbid that a producer with 30 sows might gain a foothold. . . .

Eventually, when the industry gets off its arrogance hangover, it will figure out that the customer is always right. Or, at least, that the Supreme Court has ruled. Let’s get on with raising hogs the way our customers actually want.

Opinion: 'The devil is working overtime,' but where, exactly?

"Children are dying from gunfire in school. Waves of refugees uprooted by drought and famine are knocking at the door. And we find ourselves obsessed with drag queens and legislative decorum," Storm Lake Times Pilot Editor Art Cullen writes -- mainly about Iowa's Legislature but with references to smiliar goings-on in other states, in an editorial titled "The devil is working overtime."

Art Cullen

On the day "the Tennessee House expelled two Black representatives for staging a protest from the House well over a refusal by Republicans to consider gun safety laws following a mass shooting in Nashville," Cullen was invited to appear on "The 11th Hour" on MSNBC. Host Stpehanie Rhule "wanted to talk about the crazy things going on in state legislatures in Florida, Iowa and Idaho. The Iowa Legislature has been busy bashing gays and the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Waterloo native Nikole Hannah-Jones on the history of Blacks in America, The 1619 Project. . . . Pope Francis recently said that gays are not criminals, so why do we have to pass a law to preserve our moral order?"

Cullen writes that he "had just returned from a trip across the Great Plains, where the future of food production is under assault from decades of heat and drought. That’s the issue that nobody really wants to talk about. It cannot get a hearing in Iowa. Although transsexual rights had never been a political issue in Iowa, all the sudden I am on TV talking about it. . . . We did not have the chance to talk about how climate is driving a world food crisis, which drives refugee migration. That’s why Cubans and El Salvadorans are coming to Storm Lake, not because they are protected from being in the presence of gays."

Nominations sought for Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism by April 15

Tom and Pat Gish in 2005, when the award named for
them was started and they became the first recipients.

Each year the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues presents the Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, tenacity and integrity in rural journalism, named for the couple who exemplified those qualities as publishers of The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Ky., for 52 years.

Nominations for the Gish Award may be made at any time, but the deadline for new nominations to be considered for this year's award is April 15. To make a nomination, send a detailed letter explaining how the nominee shows the kind of courage, tenacity and integrity that Tom and Pat Gish demonstrated at their weekly newspaper in the Central Appalachian coalfield. They withstood advertiser boycotts, business competition, declining population, personal attacks, and even the burning of their office to give their readers the kind of journalism often lacking in rural areas, and were the first winners of the award named for them. Tom died in 2008 and Pat in 2014; their son Ben is editor and publisher of the Eagle and serves on the award selection committee.

Documentation can be submitted after the nomination, and additional documentation may be requested or required. Send your nominating letter, initial documentation and any questions to Institute Director Al Cross at al.cross@uky.edu.

The Institute seeks nominations that measure up, at least in major respects, to the records of the Gishes and other previous winners. Other winners have been the Ezzell family of The Canadian Record in the Texas panhandle; Jim Prince and Stanley Dearman, current and late publishers of The Neshoba Democrat in Philadelphia, Miss.; Samantha Swindler of The Oregonian for her work at The Times-Tribune in Corbin, Ky., and Jacksonville Daily Progress in Texas; Stanley Nelson and the Concordia Sentinel in Ferriday, La.; Jonathan and Susan Austin of the now-defunct Yancey County News in North Carolina; the late Landon Wills of the McLean County News in Kentucky; the Trapp family of the Rio Grande Sun in northern New Mexico; Ivan Foley of the Platte County Landmark in northwestern Missouri; the Cullen family of the Storm Lake Times-Pilot in northwest Iowa; Les Zaitz of the Malheur Enterprise in eastern Oregon; in 2019, three reporters whose outstanding careers have revealed much about the coal industry in Central Appalachia: Howard Berkes, retired from NPR; Ken Ward Jr., then with the Charleston Gazette-Mail; and his mentor at the Gazette, the late Paul Nyden. In 2020 the award went to the late Tim Crews of the Sacramento Valley Mirror; in 2021 to the Thompson-High Family of The News Reporter and the Border Belt Independent in Whiteville, N.C.; and in 2022 to Ellen Kreth and the Madison County Record of Huntsville, Ark.

The Texas Tribune tells the story of The Canadian Record, perhaps ending after 130 years of weekly publication

Reporter Cathy Ricketts, editor Laurie Ezzell Brown and office manager Mary Smithee (Photo: Mark Rogers, Texas Tribune)

By Nic Garcia
The Texas Tribune

Thursday arrived as usual in the Texas Panhandle. But a new edition of The Canadian Record, this gritty town’s definitive source of local news for more than 130 years, did not come with it.

The green flag that told the townspeople that there was a new edition of the newspaper, usually 28 pages long and full of the words and photos of their neighbors and their neighbors’ kids, did not fly outside the weekly’s Main Street office.

The tabloid-size Record's March 2 cover gave no hint of its suspension.

The Record, owned by Laurie Ezzell Brown’s family since 1948, suspended its print edition March 2. The final front-page photograph captured billowing smoke. The banner headline yelled, “WILDLAND FIRE BLAZES PATH INTO OKLAHOMA.” Brown wrote the accompanying news article. Next to it was a brief about another fire that killed a local woman. There was a feature about the upcoming beef expo and a notice about the upcoming school board election. The school page featured a one-act play at the high school. And the community page had a local woman’s blueberry scone recipe. Brown had requested the scones be featured after tasting them.

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.

To enlarge an image, click on it; to download, right-click.

“It is harder to leave our posts here at The Record than you can imagine, but it also seems even more necessary,” Brown’s goodbye column started.

“We have decided to suspend publication with this issue,” it went on, “having felt we have done what could be done, and that there seems little more to say.”

The end of The Record’s print edition — even if temporary as Brown continues the search for a potential successor — offers a fresh reminder of how perilous the news business is for most local publishers and the communities they are part of. Rural newspapers like The Record face compounding threats. Not only do publishers face the same industry pressures of rising newsprint costs and an ever-expanding internet and social media landscape, but unlike their big-city peers, they also must navigate the challenges of serving a stagnant or declining population.

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.

“I am very sad for her. I’m very sad for the community,” said Wendie Cook, a Canadian City Council member. “As a collective, we don’t know what we have lost.”

The decision to sell The Record was not a market-driven decision, Brown said. The paper turns a small profit. It is debt-free. The family owns the building where they have worked to document Hemphill County’s history for seven decades.

Instead, it is intensely personal. Brown is tired. She has worked at the paper since she was a child — rarely taking more than a long weekend to recover from the frenetic pace that comes with covering city council meetings, ribbon cuttings and wildfires.

Now 70, Brown is determined to not die on the job as her father did in 1993 covering a football game.

“I have grandchildren I barely know,” she said behind her desk, for the first time in her life not facing a deadline.

Wikipedia map, adapted

Built with railroad steel and incorporated in 1887, Canadian has sat at the top of the Panhandle as the example of what rural Texas ought to be. At least that’s what folks here will tell you.

They’re tough but empathetic. Forward-looking yet conservative. There is an unrelenting demand for excellence from their children, who are in 4-H and rodeo, play football and act in the school plays. The race for high school valedictorian starts in the fifth grade.

The city’s Main Street is anchored by the refurbished Palace Theater. Across the street is the coffee shop owned by Brown’s son. The street is home to a few antique and consignment shops, doctor’s offices and banks. Despite the town’s best effort to keep the economic artery of the city alive, a collection of empty buildings have for sale or lease signs up — like the one in the corner soda fountain shop and ice cream parlor.

t’s the sort of place where you can still have disagreements among friends, said Andy Holloway, the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service agriculture and natural resources agent for Hemphill County.

“That’s the way it used to be in America,” he said. “That’s the way it is in Canadian.”

Like most rural Texas towns, this one has a sense of isolation.

It’s closer to Oklahoma City than Dallas. Austin is a world and eight-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. The city, county and other governments have occasionally come together — often at the insistence of The Record’s editorial page — to spruce up downtown and keep up the football stadium and the middle school auditorium.

You wouldn’t know it on one of the last days of winter when the town is gray and the trees are just empty branches bound together by a trunk, but a fall foliage festival draws hundreds to the banks of the Canadian River each year.

A long and storied history  

Since 1890, The Record has chronicled it all. Take this 1933 headline, for example: “Mr. And Mrs. W.D. Roberts overcome by fumes from stove.”

Several years after the Roberts family made a full recovery, Brown’s father, Ben Ezzell, purchased The Record.

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.

In the decades that followed, Ezzell, a Republican, would enrage the town’s Dixiecrats by championing for civil rights and the end of the Vietnam War. As a teenager, Brown followed her father’s lead and protested the war, which led to a ban on her joining the National Honor Society at school.

Brown would be the only one of Ezzell’s six children who went to work at the paper. She wanted to be around her parents. She was proud of their newspaper.

As an adult, she started off in advertising. But day after day, she begged her father for more responsibility in the newsroom.

“I really wanted to write,” she told The Texas Tribune. “I always wanted to write.”

Ezzell was wary to relinquish control, Brown said. He was incensed with technology he didn’t know how to use like the computer his family bought to help manage the books.

And so when Ezzell died suddenly, Brown and her mother, Nancy, were unprepared.

They faced a steep learning curve.

Neither Brown nor her mother, who helped manage the office, had any formal training to put out a newspaper.

Brown’s top priority was consistency. The Record would not miss a beat, she pledged. It was late a few times, Brown conceded. But there was never a gap in publishing. Subscribers canceled their subscriptions; they didn’t think Brown could swing it.

Journalism has long been a male-dominated industry — especially in management. That alone makes Brown’s 30-year tenure as editor and publisher remarkable. What’s more: The Record’s staff — often referred to as “The Wrecking Crew” — has been nearly all women since the day Brown took over.

“We’ve allowed a few special men to join us,” Brown said. “But it has been a woman-powered 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.

Throughout the decades, Brown would become a sentinel for Canadian — always demanding the best, as she saw it, for her town. Brown’s editorial page called on elected officials to strike a decades-old and forgotten kennel code that had prohibited residents to own more than three dogs. It would support a private youth correctional facility to create jobs in a town defined by booms and busts of the oil and gas industry. It would publicly support investments for the football stadium, but only after Brown met with the superintendent to ensure the middle school’s auditorium was also refurbished.

Downtown Canadian and the countryside beyond
(Photo by Mark Rogers, Texas Tribune)

“I think you have to fight every day for the survival of a small rural town,” Brown said.

Not only did she inherit her father’s business, she also inherited his moniker as the liberal publisher. It’s not a label she entirely rejects.

“I was perfectly capable of making people mad,” she said.

During those early days on the beat, Brown attended every meeting of the city council and county commissioners and the school and hospital boards. She trailed the football team to every away game. Now, she holds the institutional knowledge of the town.

“I’ve learned a lot about the people I live with,” she said.

Though a slog, it’s not the meetings that stand out in Brown’s memory.

She remembers a high school student who joined the service after 9/11. Before the student shipped off, Brown spent time with him talking about sports photography. The young Canadian resident died in a helicopter crash overseas. His funeral was protested by the Westboro Baptist Church, a radical anti-LGBTQ Kansas congregation known for disrupting military funerals with anti-gay protests.

A much larger crowd, including many men on motorcycles waving American flags, blocked out the protesters. That day gave Brown — who had protested Vietnam — a new appreciation of service and valor.

“You see people in a different way when you see what they do and what they risk,” Brown said.

Hemphill County will join a growing list of Texas counties without a newspaper if The Record ultimately stops publishing.

At least 27 counties — all of them rural — have no paper, according to a national study on the state of local news from the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. What replaces them, research has found, is a mix of misinformation, higher taxes, greater political polarization and lower voter turnout.

And then there is the loss you can’t measure, said Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky.

“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.”

Canadian City Manager Joe Jarosek talks about what the paper
means to him. (Photo by Mark Rogers, Texas Tribune)

Brown’s history and the hunt for a potential buyer are the subject of a new documentary “For the Record,” which is currently being shown at film festivals across the country. It will be screened April 13 at the University of Texas’ AT&T Hotel and Conference Center amphitheater in Austin prior to the start of the 24th International Symposium on Online Journalism. The viewing is free for the public but registration is required.

Residents like Holloway, the AgriLife agent, are pushing officials to action. He’s called on the town’s economic development group to help find a potential buyer.

“Without a newspaper our community, will die on the vine,” he said.

Russ Jones, a local ranchhand since 1984, said The Record was a way for him to stay connected with the town’s schools.

“I just like keeping up with the kids,” he said.

He “hates” that the paper is stopping publication. But he’s lost a newspaper before. He used to get the Amarillo Globe delivered to his front porch daily. An avid reader, he’d sometimes meet his carrier at the door before the sun came up, he said.

He’ll go on listening to the local talk radio station out of Perryton and watching the Amarillo TV stations.

Glenda Nix, who moved back to Canadian about a decade ago after living out of state, remembers growing up with her twin sister and giggling over items in The Record’s police blotter. There was always something about a cow, she laughed, reflecting on The Record’s archives at a recent lunch.

While her family subscribed to the paper for years, she has read The Record “less and less.”

She’ll continue to get her news from friends, Facebook and church, she said.

A lawsuit complicates things  

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 day after she called off the sale, a local family sued Brown [and other news outlets] for defamation over her coverage of their son’s death.

Thomas Brown — no relation to Laurie Ezzell Brown — was the 18-year-old class president of Canadian High School who went missing the day before Thanksgiving 2016 and was later found dead. For years, the inconclusive nature of his death has hung over the town fueling suspicion and rumors. Numerous theories have been floated and investigated, including by the Texas attorney general’s office. No charges have ever been filed.

Most recently, The Record’s editorial page has called for the removal of giant signs placed around downtown that remind the town of the teenager’s death. “There is a killer among us,” the signs read, asking anyone with information about the death to call a tip line.

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.

“As a community — and I believe I speak for many, if not all — we’ve had enough,” she wrote in an editorial last fall.

Brown calls the lawsuit frivolous. The family, she says, has never asked for a correction or clarification for the dozens of articles and editorials she has written over the years.

The family’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.

If there is any hope to sell the newspaper, the lawsuit will need to be settled first, Brown said.

The story of The Record’s demise may be less about the economics of the news business as it is the economics of rural America.

Texas’ rural population is declining. Many people are leaving for urban centers. The lucky counties like Hemphill aren’t losing people too quickly — its population has for the last few decades held at about 3,000.

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.

“I don’t know if we’ve reached bottom yet,” Joe Jarosek, the city manager, said.

Brown promises that the rural way of life is worth it. If there is blight in Canadian, there is also a tight-knit community and access to nature that can’t be found in big cities.

Nearby, another weekly is revived  

Not all hope is lost for Panhandle publications. Sixty miles northwest of Canadian in Spearman, another rural town of nearly 3,000 people, a weekly newspaper has been given new life.

The Reporter-Statesman, online here, was founded in 1907.

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.

She said she bought the newspaper — with only months of journalism experience working alongside the previous owner — to hold the government accountable, maintain a historical record and help build the community.

The Reporter-Statesman is a family affair. Bellsynder’s daughter, who is away at college, helps her build ads, just as Brown helped her dad so many decades ago.

Bellsnyder calls herself a “staunch” Republican. And she admits it has been hard to check her opinions. She knows how much she has to learn about reporting and writing. “It takes a lot of confidence to write a news article,” she said. She hopes to grow the paper, which costs about $1,000 a week to produce and has not yet turned a profit, into a rural success story.

“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.

What little silence the newsroom has is cut with the crackle of a police scanner. Among the countless newspaper prizes hung on the walls is a portrait of Brown’s mother. Her ashes sit on a bookshelf behind the desk she occupied throughout her life.

“Mom always said she felt useless if she wasn’t at work,” Brown said.

The Record office has two flags to post outside: red when the paper is being
produced, green if copies have arrived. (Photo: Mark Rogers, Texas Tribune)

Even without a print edition to put out, Brown and her two colleagues — Mary Smithee, the office manager and “comic relief,” and Cathy Ricketts, a reporter — work away at their desks.

For an unspecified amount of time, Brown has promised to continue to keep The Record’s website and Facebook page active. She’ll post weather and wildfire reports, obituaries and other “stuff people really need to know about.”

“We’re exhausted,” Brown said, a draft of a Facebook post lingering on her screen. “I can’t do everything anymore.”

For so many years, she tried to produce a newspaper her parents would be proud of and that was worthy of her hometown. She daydreamed about what this moment would be like, handing off the paper to a new owner who cared as much about preserving the intertwined legacy of Canadian and The Record as she did.

“Without a town there is no newspaper,” she said. “I would say without a newspaper, there is no town. But that’s my own skewed view of things.”

Instead there is guilt. Guilt that she let down her family, her town and her fellow rural newspapers publishers.

And she worries what will fill the void. Maybe nothing? Maybe something worse: gossip and hearsay and conspiracy theories.

Maybe when the lawsuit is settled, she’ll find a buyer. Or she’ll put out one final keepsake edition.

Or maybe she’ll start a blog. She’s unchained to a relentless deadline. Anything is possible.

“If it is to go on, it needs to be simpler,” she said. “There is news we need to convey.”