By Willy Stern

The Tennessean gets low marks when compared to similar papers

In every city, people love to whine about their daily paper. To get above the carping and elevate the debate, the Scene turned to outside professionals to compare The Tennessean with similar papers. We selected The Hartford Courant, the Austin American-Statesman, the Louisville Courier-Journal, and the Memphis Commercial Appeal. We compared The Tennessean only to papers in cities smaller than Nashville.

In addition, we only used cities with one major daily newspaper. Four of the cities were in the South. Two were in a state that had a native son running for president, three were state capitals, and two had top-level professional sports teams. All were owned by newspaper chains, and one of them—The Courier-Journal—is, like Nashville’s daily, owned by Gannett Co. When we discussed the project with Tennessean editor Frank Sutherland, he said that he had done similar analyses and had used the Louisville and Austin papers in his comparisons.

We randomly selected the final editions of each newspaper published from Aug. 29, 2000, to Sept. 4, 2000.

Robert Healy, former executive editor of the The Boston Globe, and John Mashek, former national correspondent for the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, analyzed the newspapers. Self-professed newspaper junkies, Healy and Mashek have more than 80 years of news experience between them. We also analyzed the online versions of the five papers. Nora Paul, director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication, conducted that analysis.

All three panelists said they had no conflicts of interest and promised objectivity in their reports. They were not paid. We provided the experts’ names to Sutherland, who had no objections to them.

"The major reason I ranked The Tennessean at the bottom of this control group,” Healy says, “is that there are no ‘holy shit’ stories in the papers. Maybe it was a bum week, but you’d expect to find something in the papers that was compelling. At least once, you’d want to pick up The Tennessean and say, ‘Holy shit!’ It didn’t happen.”

Specifically, Healy ranked the paper in a tie for last place with The Commercial Appeal. As for Mashek, who has also worked in senior positions for The Dallas Morning News and U.S. News & World Report, he ranked it next to last. His rationale was similar to Healy’s.

“You need to give people a reason to pick up the paper,” Mashek says. “The Tennessean didn’t. It was predictable and careful. There just wasn’t much there to read.”

Mashek, a panelist in televised presidential or vice presidential debates in 1984, 1988, and 1992, and today an adjunct professor for the University of Texas, says he ranked The Tennessean fourth, slightly ahead of The Commercial Appeal, largely because he found the Memphis paper’s layout and presentation to be “awful.”

Interestingly, both Healy and Mashek selected the Austin American-Statesman, owned by Cox Enterprises, as hands-down the best paper. The former newsmen were generally disappointed in the quality of all five papers but said Memphis and Nashville distinguished themselves for their poor editorial content.

Explains Healy, “I don’t know the new guy [Frank Sutherland], but it’s clear to me he’s no John Seigenthaler.”

Both newsmen were most struck by the sense that The Tennessean was lacking any direction or purpose. They were skeptical about the paper’s ability to hold on to its readers. Explains Healy, “The Tennessean has to stand for something. They’ve got to go out and do one or two damn good stories in a week.”

Mashek says it was clear, after reading the papers, why The Tennessean no longer enjoys a national reputation as a good regional newspaper. “Neither their editorials, nor news, nor the investigative work is staking out any positions. Eventually, they are going to lose their readers.”

To be fair, both Healy and Mashek grew up in a different era of journalism. They both acknowledge that they aren’t comfortable with the changes that chain ownership has brought to American journalism. Still, they were both clear that The Tennessean doesn’t stack up well against the other chain-owned papers they were asked to read.

“Some days,” Mashek says, “as the old expression goes, The Tennessean is the kind of paper you could pick up at the end of your driveway and have it read by the time you got to your trash can at the back.”

Sutherland responded to the criticisms by saying that each city’s readers have different “wants and needs” that may not be known to an out-of-state judge. As an example, he explains, The Tennessean frequently runs hard-news stories about entertainment in the features section. That, he says, is a result of the huge country music business here in Nashville.

Sutherland takes exception to the criticism of his paper’s editorial page. He notes that his paper has taken the lead on many big issues facing Nashville, including the building of the downtown arena, the recruiting of an NFL team, the redevelopment and historic preservation of downtown Nashville, and the merger of General and Meharry-Hubbard hospitals. As well, Sutherland is particularly proud of the leadership The Tennessean has exercised in its campaign for education. “We have nothing to apologize for in our editorial stands,” he says.

Here are highlights of each panelist’s comments. First, Healy, in his own words:

♦ There is no detailed analysis or ruffling of feathers in The Tennessean.

♦ The Tennessean’s front page looked like a refrigerator door, full of signs pointing you to half-assed stories.

♦ There’s too much wire copy; in the Tuesday edition, The Tennessean didn’t have a single local writer on the front of the Living page. That’s incredible.

♦ The business section was pretty good, except for a lack of economic stories.

♦ Pretty solid coverage in sports, particularly of the pro teams.

♦ The editorial page is a real problem. It doesn’t stand for anything. They badly underestimate the power of the op-eds and editorials to counter the power of TV and other media.

♦ It amazed me, with a local guy running for president, that they basically missed the Al Gore story. He’s a local friggin’ guy, and they were sitting on the sidelines.

♦ No investigative stories, no enterprise of any note.

♦ I was very surprised at how small the ratio of news-to-ads was in The Tennessean versus, say, Austin.

♦ I get no sense that Tennessean reporters know what’s going on in their city. They should own downtown, the poor, something.

Mashek who was a visiting scholar at the First Amendment Center in Nashville in 1996, found a few more bright spots than did Healy, but still hit similar notes:

♦ I wasn’t thrilled about the presentation of The Tennessean, in USA Today format, which stresses brevity over depth.

♦ The Tennessean had no edge, no investigative bent, no “gee whiz” quality.

♦ Frank Sutherland has a real chance to show leadership of the paper in Nashville, and he loses it by writing a wine column. That sends the wrong signal to the reader.

♦ I got a cluttered feeling reading all those short stories; The Tennessean’s editors are sacrificing the credibility of the readers when they go for brevity.

♦ The Tennessean was simply not on top of the Bridgestone-Firestone story, which was a local story.

♦ The Tennessean’s story on SATs in the state was very well done. That’s the kind of enterprise stories they should be doing every day.

♦ The Tennessean sacrificed national and international news for local coverage, but so did the other four papers.

♦ The business section was first-rate. Stood up well against all the other papers, except Austin.

♦ David Climer in sports is a very talented writer.

♦ There’s a tinge of hometown boosterism in the Titans coverage but no more so than the other papers.

♦ “Brad About You” is a waste of very prominent space.

♦ Use of colors and visuals was very uneven. Some days very good, others not.

♦ Editorial cartoons lacked bite. Who are they afraid of offending?

♦ The editorial page was plain vanilla, lacking any edge. There’s nothing there to draw a reader to the editorial pages.

♦ Antagonizing readers is a small price to pay to be a leader in the community. You can see that in a week. Tennessean editors don’t understand this.

♦ The editorial page was plain vanilla, lacking any edge. There’s nothing there to draw a reader to the editorial pages.

♦ Antagonizing readers is a small price to pay to be a leader in the community. You can see that in a week. Tennessean editors don’t understand this.