E ditorial
There is a halfway decent chance that at first glance, readers might have thought the front page of this week’s edition of the Chronicle was an April Fool’s joke, especially given my announcement that I would be filing for one of several public offices last April. Despite the brevity of content and its surplus of metaphorical meaning, this week’s front page is the result of the discourse that grows in the absence of sunlight.
On March 2, 2023, just 250 miles to the north — practically a next-door neighbor by Texas standards — in Hemphill County, The Canadian Record quietly suspended publication. The newspaper provided information its readers used to fuel their community for 130 years. It has been in Laurie Ezzell’s family for the last 75 of them.
I’ve read several articles about the Record’s closure with the Texas Tribune’s Nic Garcia’s being a good one, a link to which I'll attach to the bottom for our digital readers. There is also a documentary about the newspaper by Heather Courtney titled, “For the Record,” which you can search for on your own.
I tried to let it go. I really did. All month long, but it can’t.
We came into the newspaper business eight years ago with nothing more than a paralleling skillset and an over-romanticized idea about what journalism was supposed to be, and when we saw the pages of The Canadian Record, we knew that’s what the news looked like.
In fact, my ego can sit stoically in its urn while I admit the Chronicle has evolved into what you read today due to the bar set by publications like The Canadian Record, Eldorado Success, Albany News, and The Fayette County Record, and it pisses me off that another newspaper shuddered while everyone sticks their heads beneath the sands of social affirmation while ignoring the informational desert growing around them.
Readers of the Chronicle living in Fisher and Stonewall County sit on the edge of one of those deserts. On the other side of the news vacuum, our friends at the Texas Spur stand like an informational oasis in Dickens County, as the counties in all four cardinal directions are void of local newspapers.
The desert surrounding The Texas Spur lies in the heart of Texas Senate District 28, home to the often-unopposed Senator Charles Perry from Lubbock via Sweetwater. Five of the six counties in the state’s panhandle without a newspaper are within Perry’s district, which could be the reason he rarely leaves the Hub City unless it's to go to Austin or to profess his economic sacrifice to rural civics students, and one thing both Republican and Democratic Judges in rural areas can agree is that he is no friend of small counties.
Now while I will admit I am equally no cheerleader of Perry’s — even when he’s unopposed he doesn’t get my vote — he isn’t the cause of the news void. There are many reasons the news industry came unraveled and continues to unspool, none more powerful than the internet throwing a big ol’ digital monkey-wrench into an otherwise well-oiled physical machine.
For generations, people have grown accustomed to fact important stories related to the sinking of the Titanic, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Teamsters movement, civil rights, Watergate, Waco, and Enron could be purchased for less than coffee to drink while reading it.
In the time between Al Gore inventing the internet and Trump tweeting “Fake News,” America decided to defund the press, with zillions of advertising dollars being spent pennies at a time for low-cost digital advertising or free social media platforms, regardless of the returns.
Nobody’s fault there either. Survival of the fittest. We are Capitalists after all; adapt or die... But if subscription rates no longer offset increasing production costs associated with printing and distributing, and advertising revenues unable to support newsroom payroll, who is paying for that information so many claim they want to know?
Apparently, nobody. The Canadian Record is still a financially stable business that turns a profit, there is simply no one left willing to do the work. And it is important work because all stories are our stories and that they are told is one of the most important elements of our society.
It is only when we know that we can do. Fox News didn’t break the series of stories that led to the nationwide manhunt and eventual capture of fundamentalist church leader Warren Jeffs. It was the aforementioned Eldorado Success, a newspaper serving a Texas county of less than 2,500.
CNN didn’t break the story about the death of Ahmaud Arbery — one of the most important stories in decades in my opinion — Larry Hobbs broke that story and kept making noise until it was heard.
Who is Larry Hobbs? Just a guy in the newsroom of The Brunswick News, a newspaper outside Atlanta with a shrinking newsroom still applying as much ink to the page as the advertising will support.
Good thing there were enough ads to keep the ink flowing in Georgia in 2021, and I hope the Texas landscape gets a little irrigation of its own before the information desert becomes overfertilized by TikTok.
Read Nic Garcia’s article here: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/14/texasnews- deserts-canadian-record-closing/