What I Learned From Journalism Event

Sunday afternoon, Feb. 2, a crowd of 50-plus folks gathered at Flatonia’s Lyric Theater to watch the documentary film, “For The Record.” A 35-minute unfolding of the life of a small-town newspaper, this one in Canadian, TX, a rural community in the Panhandle, was an intense, up-close-and-personal account of the struggle by a single owner-manager to keep this family-owned, 130-yearold paper publishing the local news, all through the Covid-era decline in social and business activity and the simultaneous continuous loss of advertising revenue to the Internet.

The event, organized by the League of Women Voters of South Central Texas, included a panel discussion about our own area’s papers, with three current or former editors/publishers of the Fayette County Record (among others) as participants: Regina Keilers, current publisher; Jeff Wick, current editor; and Larry Jackson, a former editor and publisher of a number of papers, including the local Record.

Both the film and the panel underscored the challenges facing print journalism today. While advertising revenue used to bring in a significant portion of the paper’s revenues to cover its costs, classified ads are now about a quarter of what they were 15 to 20 years ago. Display ads are also significantly down (much less or zero revenue now from real estate, car sales, or furniture store ads), as are revenues from inserted advertising flyers (no HEB weekly ads anymore).

While the internet (where most advertising has moved to) may be faster getting “news” out there, there’s no fact-checker to set the record straight, as there always is for local print journalism. As panelists pointed out, local readers are both vocal and relentless in criticizing the editors and publishers of print journalism, often from all sides of an issue, with both sides claiming bias. And when a paper has a vibrant opinion page, with pretty much all views aired, nothing goes uncriticized or uncorrected when the Record gets it wrong.

What’s the future of print journalism? Many, many small communities have lost their papers for good; others will soon do so. For now, the Record is “hanging in there,” as the largest circulation semi-weekly small-town paper in the state of Texas. But longer-term, that future is not guaranteed. At some point, subscriptions may need to be raised to cover the entire cost of the paper, and then the concern is whether subscribers will still want to pay that higher yearly bill.

To lose a paper, however, as the town of Canadian learned in 2023 when the paper there finally closed, is to lose part of the soul of a town. No one will cover the school board meetings, the football and basketball, volleyball and golf, tennis and swimming events of three school districts; the births, baptisms, confirmations, graduations, weddings, and funerals of everyone who lives there; the parades, the plays and concerts, the county fairs, the livestock shows. Where will we learn about the Commissioners’ Court meetings, local law enforcement activities, the city council meetings, the goings-on at the local airport, the VFW meetings, the LCRAplant’s goings-on? Where can we read about the events coming up at Monument Hill State Historic Site, the Round Top Family Library, the Fayette County Library/Archives, Festival Hill, or the antiques fair?

All of these things and more, far too many more to list, are what we find in ONE PLACE with a local paper, not scattered among twenty or thirty different Facebook or X or other social media platforms. With one glance, we can see what was so important in the area that it made the front page of the news or sports section; we can find out in the opinion section who’s the most rabid letter-writing supporter or denigrator this week of the current resident of the White House; and we can lament the lives lost in the obituary section, covering the life stories of both local decedents and others with local connections.

Is all this worth $64 per year to me? ABSOLUTELY! I hope you agree, dear readers, and keep subscribing and keep reading, like I surely will. And remember that giving a gift subscription reminds the recipient of your gift twice a week for a whole year.