When I moved here in 1987, there were two daily newspapers in Nashville. The editorial page of the morning edition of The Tennessean was tilted to the left. And the evening paper, The Nashville Banner, had its editorial page tilted to the right. I still subscribe to The Tennessean, but The Banner is long gone. In 1998, The Tennessean acquired a longtime competitor and shut it down.
I remember the venerable newspaper fondly, even if its editorial pages didn't align with my politics. Some of the local journalists I most admire started their careers at The Banner. And a city of competing newsrooms, each determined to tell the news first and get it right, is protected by a powerful bulwark against extremism and government mischief. In a democracy, the only way to be sure there are no foxes monitoring the chicken coop is to assign a bunch of reporters to watch for foxes.
Fewer than a dozen U.S. cities currently publish two competing daily newspapers, and many areas have no local news source at all. Nashville, like many other mid-sized cities, still has a television news channel, an alternative news weekly (The Nashville Scene), and a variety of online publications for chicken coop watching. Nevertheless, the total number of reporters covering important areas such as state and local politics, education, and criminal justice was significantly lower than the Tennessean and Banner newspapers, which were each well-staffed and well-funded for scoops. It has decreased dramatically compared to the times. .
It is no longer possible to think of a well-staffed and well-funded local newspaper, whether in print or online. Gannett, the nation's largest newspaper chain, owns daily newspapers in his three of Tennessee's four largest cities, including the Tennessean in Nashville. Gannett fought off a hostile takeover by a predatory hedge fund in 2019, but was forced to merge with another company backed by the fund later that year.
The impact was devastating: dozens of newspapers closed, more than half of their employees were laid off, journalists revolted – the list goes on and on. “The scale of local news disruption in the Gannett market is staggering,” read the headline of an analysis last year by Joshua Benton of Harvard University's Nieman Institute. And Gannett's plundering of its newspaper's resources is not the only problem facing the news industry.
Entering this media environment, veteran Nashville journalist Steve Cavendish launched the 21st Century Nashville Banner as a daily online source of local news. The new banner has nothing in common with the old banner other than the name and a commitment to local journalism. Like The Tennessee Lookout, a daily electronic publication that began operations in 2020, and Nashville's NPR affiliate WPLN News, the new banner is not locked behind a paywall. And like news outlets like The Lookout and his WPLN, as well as Memphis' The Daily Memphian and MLK50, the new Banner is a nonprofit newsroom. Cavendish believes this difference represents the future of local journalism's existence. “For the past 20 years, the only startups that have been successful at the local level have been on the nonprofit side,” he told me in a phone interview.
I first met Mr. Cavendish when he was editor of the alternative news weekly Nashville City Paper and I was editor of Chapter 16, a nonprofit source for Tennessee-related literary reporting. It was when Chapter 16 provides book reviews and author interviews free of charge to our newspaper affiliates across the state. City Paper, which was once one of our partners, no longer exists. Chapter 16 is well underway.
Another difference between the new banner and the old newspaper is that Demetria Kalodimos, a well-known Nashville broadcast journalist, serves as the organization's executive producer. She is also the head of video and hosts a weekly podcast.
Kalodimos and her team have already produced a number of mini-documentaries, including one based on vintage footage from civil rights demonstrations in Nashville. In 1960, Fisk University student Diane Nash confronted Mayor Ben West outside the Nashville courthouse. In his exchange, he acknowledged that he recognized the injustice of racial segregation. Shortly after, Nashville became the first major city in the South to desegregate its lunch counters. A banner video provided historical context for news reports that Nash returned to Nashville on April 20 to speak at a ceremony marking the renaming of historic Courthouse Square in her honor. ing.
Black history has once again become a controversial issue in the South, with revisionist politicians passing legislation restricting how race can be taught and discussed in schools. The Banner's Ms. Nash package combines video and news reports to frankly explain historical facts and their impact today. There is nothing in either work that could be called partisan.
That's by specification. Hoping to avoid partisan rancor, Cavendish and Kalodimos positioned the new banner entirely as a news publication, with no editorials, opinion essays or candidate endorsements. “Every dollar we have goes into news reporting,” Cavendish said. “Because we want a lot of things when it comes to news.”
Still, it will be difficult to avoid partisan criticism in the Republican-majority state. Donald Trump has referred to journalists as the enemy of the people during his presidency, and hostility toward news organizations is a hallmark of the MAGA movement. Labeling them as “independent” is unlikely to change their attitudes.
But progressive, vibrant, and growing Nashville may be the perfect place to break through bipartisan anger. If old-fashioned public service journalism can succeed anywhere, it can succeed here. In that sense, the new banner will not compete with other similarly needed news organizations in the city. This is another much-needed element in a journalism network working to repair the fragmented landscape of local news.
Of course, the question of money still remains. Even with financial support from institutions like the MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Institute for Nonprofit News, and the American Journalism Project, nonprofit newsrooms survive only with the financial support of readers and listeners. Masu. And in this age of proliferating websites, podcasts, videos, and newsletters, not to mention constant social media updates from journalists and “citizen journalists,” that loyalty, much less money, can be counted on for long enough. Attracting an audience may be its greatest achievement. A challenge for everyone.
Staying on top of all this news can sometimes feel like a job.
Maybe it feels like work because it's work. Democracy's job, democracy's responsibility, is to provide an informed citizenry with a wide range of diverse news sources and an ability to capture the truth, no matter how zealously elected officials may try to hide it. We must be citizens who strive to do our best. The worst thing that can happen to a democracy, especially in a red state like Tennessee, is that the government is often not even remotely working for or even responsive to its own people, but local journalism is to collapse.
In Nashville, like just about every other place it survives, local news is already dangerously close to collapse. But the Nashville Banner, a long-defunct local newspaper, has officially returned to the world as a nonpartisan, nonprofit digital newsroom. This is the best news for local democracy I've heard in a long time.
Banner is dead. Long live the banner.