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CANADIAN — 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 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.
“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.”
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