Running out of time and money, a journalist battles an oil bust, a global pandemic, and a growing distrust of the media as she tries to keep her newspaper alive in rural Texas.
In a small Texas Panhandle town, which has survived oil booms and busts, devastating wildfires, and a diminishing population, a few things have remained constant – cowboys, high school football, conservative voters, and the family-owned weekly newspaper The Canadian Record. Despite editor Laurie Ezzell Brown’s liberal editorials in one of the most conservative counties in the country, The Record is loved and relied on by the community. But now, an already bad economy has been made much worse by the global pandemic – bad news for a paper that gets 90% of its revenue from advertising. For The Record is a mostly verite documentary following the life of Laurie, her town, and her newspaper, as she leads a valiant effort to keep it alive.