Laurie Brown sits in the offices of the largely defunct Canadian Record, which her family has owned in the Texas Panhandle since 1948, pondering a relevant question to her community of about 2,300 residents 105 miles northeast of Amarillo: Where do people go for information during the next wildfire now that the Record no longer publishes as a weekly newspaper?
As we talked one late Sunday afternoon this summer, Brown, sitting behind her desk in the large one-room office that the Record still occupies on Canadian’s East Main Street, raised a pertinent question for her hometown and surrounding farms and ranches. The largest wildfire in Texas history raged across the northeastern part of the Panhandle in February 2024, forcing the evacuation of the picturesque town of Canadian with its rolling hills and mesas.
The Record, which counted about 2,500 subscribers at one point, shuttered its print operations in March 2023. But Brown maintains a website, and when the fires broke out, she rushed back from a conference in Houston to report on the disaster through the online operation and a Facebook page. The passionate journalist kept reporting for weeks on the Smokehouse Creek fire that burned 80% of her county, millions of acres, and about 60 homes.
As we talked further, she recalled seeing an uptick in people’s interest in local news after the fires. A woman stopped her in the Walmart in Pampa about 45 miles away and told Brown she missed the Record.
Still, the dollars had not added up, so Brown and the Record faced the decision in 2023 that thousands of newspapers had encountered as the digital age contributed to the collapse of their business model. Her father had died on the job — he was covering a high school playoff game when he collapsed and passed away. She didn’t want the same thing to happen to her as she entered her 70s, which is why she started seeking a buyer for the paper.
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She has yet to find a satisfactory bid, so Brown’s using the Record’s website to post obituaries, high school sports scores, and alerts about such events as a community blood drive. Recently, the site contained a post from the Texas Press Association about happenings in the Texas Legislature.
Thanks to a new Texas law, her online site also is eligible to post legal notices about things like an increase in a local tax rate. Those notices contribute some revenue. And Brown is considering whether to expand subscriptions to the Record’s online site, which some news outlets around the country are pursuing as a revenue source. Still, Canadian no longer has a weekly newspaper, one where journalism protocols like fact-checking and multiple sourcing prevail.
Meanwhile, a local Facebook site has emerged where some Canadian residents post notices about community issues. Brown said she once corrected a post there for its inaccuracy but the person writing the comment told her he didn’t care about the facts.
‘I was not ready to shut it down’
A democracy like ours depends upon reliable sources of information so we as citizens can make informed decisions. In the absence of such, where do people go for reporting about their communities when their paper closes or downsizes? Where do they find information about candidates for local office, bond elections or crime reports?
This challenge certainly applies to the citizens of Booker, Texas, about 45 minutes north of Canadian. Joni Yara recently explained, as we met at a local coffee shop, how she had decided to close the Booker News, which her family bought in 1996.
Yara described her family having a good life as they together put out the weekly paper, which she took over in 2017 and continued running until she decided to shut it down last year. Circulation was declining from around 850 subscribers to 450 (one subscriber lived in Alaska, and another in Washington, D.C.), and she thought her four children needed her attention.
“I was not ready to shut it down,” Yara confessed. “It was a very emotional decision.”
But she made the hard call after no buyer emerged, so the offices of the Booker News on the city’s main business corridor closed.
Like Brown, whom she described as a mentor, Yara worries where people now go for accurate information. She surmised that many in her conservative community would use free sources like social media or Fox News for national information. But those options don’t provide the kind of community reporting that local newspapers do about the city council, local sports scores or when a new police chief comes to town, as happened in Booker recently. As Yara said, those who live in a town after the paper closes are still interested in their community, especially their schools.
That’s why the Booker school superintendent asked Yara’s father, in the absence of a newspaper, to continue to provide high school football statistics for coaches. And the City Council posts videos from its meetings on a Facebook page. Still, Yara explained, people don’t talk about the City Council like they once did. She worries about people believing what they want to believe.
A pioneer in Hansford County
“There is no silver bullet or magic answer for this challenge,” Austin Lewter, director of the Texas Center for Community Journalism at Tarleton State University, said during a recent interview. The problem impacts more than rural communities or small towns, too. Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism’s annual review of local newspapers notes that suburban papers have folded, too.
But, as Lewter observed, there are efforts worth noting. Consider the work of Suzanne Bellsnyder, a former aide in the Texas Legislature. The fifth-generation Texan returned to her hometown of Spearman in the Panhandle 11 years ago and eventually purchased the Hansford County Reporter Statesman and Sherman County Gazette. The papers are now combined into a double edition and circulate weekly in the northernmost reaches of the state to about 500 people.
The self-described Republican considers herself an “accidental journalist” who grew tired of politics but wants to provide a voice for rural Texans while bringing reliable information to them.
Bellsnyder acknowledges there are plenty of logistics to manage, like getting the paper printed and delivered. Fortunately, she gets support from the Community Journalism Project, which earns a commission for helping with tasks like selling ads and managing the website.
The entrepreneur’s next goal is growing readership. Bellsnyder doesn’t consider herself a social media aficionado, but her recent Tik Tok series explaining the Hansford County budget drew 10,000 views — about twice the population of the entire county. She’s also considering how to do a podcast for rural radio stations to use. “Newspapers must rebuild their brand,” she said, “while meeting people where they are.”
Meanwhile, Bellsnyder has launched a Substack column that focuses on rural Texans. She writes about issues like public schools, economic development and health care. Her Substack circulation is about 3,500 readers, including the speaker of the Texas House and other legislators. She also self-syndicates a column to community papers across the state.
Organizations such as Tarleton’s Texas Center for Community Journalism and the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Rural Journalism provide support for rural papers like Bellsnyder’s. They do so through training programs, conferences and editing and publishing tips. And it helped that Texas legislators agreed to let digital sites publish the kind of legal notices the Canadian Record does on its site. Even small-bore changes like that, or simply allowing readers to deduct the cost of their subscriptions on tax returns, can help.
Still, what happens when a news vacuum arises in a community should concern us. Facts matter. Without them we are all free to simply believe our own realities. That is hardly a good outcome for us as individuals, our communities and certainly not our nation.
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