Monday, April 7, 2008
Media The Tennessean's New Slogan: It's Just the Same Old Scene
Posted by Matt Pulle on Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 11:08 AM
Today, The Tennessean had a front-page story about how the state's death penalty study committee might be disbanded after pressure from prosecutors. If it sounds familiar, it's because you read about it first in a Scene story by Sarah Kelley nearly two months ago.
Yesterday, The Tennessean reported that the nursing home lobby is aiming to limit lawsuits in the wake of a 2003 fire at a Nashville facility that killed over a dozen people. Of course, the details of this Page One story were first reported by our own Jeff Woods back in February.
But we don't come to bury The Tennessean for getting beat. That happens to the best papers in the country—see The New York Times and Watergate. But when you do miss a vital story about the state's deliberations on the death penalty or the crass politicking of the nursing home industry, don't wait two months to tell your readers about it all. If the Scene's old news stories seem important enough to put on your front page now, then they were really important back when they first became news.
