Good News, Bad News: The State of Nashville’s Media Landscape

In big headline caps, the July 20 print edition of The Tennessean proclaimed that “Nolansville has ‘Weaver Fever,’” teasing a heartwarming feature on Nolensville Little League star Stella Weaver. Such a glaring headline error means that a few mistakes were made, somewhere along the line. It got past some people and didn’t get checked by other people — a classic newsroom breakdown.

Once held together by the city’s flagship daily newspaper, Nashville’s media landscape has diffused across new properties, resurrected brands, social platforms, audio and video. While The Tennessean leaves a vacuum for news and reporting, new voices have filled in. Journalism is turning inside-out while the city explodes, making business news, entertainment buzz and political headlines. We can start with the bad news.

In many regards, The Tennessean of today functions more as a financial experiment than a news organization. Reporting is expensive, and parent corporation Gannett has stripped the paper for parts. A typical online front page buries a few local news stories among college sports coverage, listicles, animal videos and, a recent favorite, themed archival photo galleries like “Nashville Then: 40 Years Ago in July 1983.” Rather than lean on its name brand to produce deeply reported stories based on verified information, the paper has responded to a divided news environment by running editorials that pander to the right. It has committed a few unforced errors in the process, like publishing Laurie Cardoza Moore’s May 2022 argument for banning books, and at a panel a week later, failing to moderate Republican congressional candidates in the name of free speech. Add to that public insults aimed at Tennesseans writ large from executive editor Michael Anastasi and it becomes difficult to imagine what function the paper hopes to fulfill in the city.

Once sought after as a training ground for cub reporters, The Tennessean newsroom has struggled to retain talent, hemorrhaging its best young reporters before they hit the two-year mark. Arcelia Martin, a Columbia journalism grad, reported in Nashville for a little more than a year before following fellow Tennessean expat Meghan Mangrum to The Dallas Morning News. When she left, Mangrum, who reported at the Chattanooga Times Free Press before moving to The Tennessean, was approaching five years covering education in Tennessee. The paper’s two star political reporters of the past decade both jumped to national outlets — Joey Garrison to the USA Today Network in 2019 and Natalie Allison to Politico in 2021 — while Adam Friedman, reared at the Gannett-owned Jackson Sun, made it 23 months at The Tennessean before moving to Tennessee Lookout this spring. LeBron Hill, one of the paper’s opinion voices, announced a hop from The Tennessean to the Times Free Press last week. When it launched a daily newsletter in Nashville, news site Axios lured Tennessean veterans Nate Rau (after a brief stint at the Lookout) and Adam Tamburin, two of the most experienced reporters in the city. It’s a strategy Axios founder Jim VandeHei has not been shy about: poach talent, pay better than anyone else, amass affluent email readers who can command more lucrative ad rates than traditional digital advertising. The Scene snatched Cole Villena from Gannett’s Williamson County desk earlier this year. Layoffs have become routine at The Tennessean, often coinciding with Gannett earnings reports.

The city’s former paper of record now spreads fewer reporters across more beats. Three years into the job, Cassandra Stephenson covers business, real estate, crime, city politics and the courts along with Sandy Mazza, her senior counterpart. Melissa Brown and Vivian Jones, who started full time in April, represent the entire Capitol Hill press coverage for all Gannett newspapers in the state, consolidating into two people what would have been four or five in previous decades. While The Tennessean pipes in national news coverage from its USA Today Network, The Commercial Appeal in Memphis and the Knoxville News Sentinel — all Gannett properties — share state legislative coverage. Consolidated ownership means fewer reporters (that’s the point), and fewer reporters means less competition. Shared articles means a shared point of view and a smaller press pool, casualties of the new news business at the expense of the reader. It’s a common industry practice when an owner holds multiple titles; Scene parent company FW Publishing does the same between the Scene, the Nashville Post and The News. 

Papers make money with advertising and subscriptions (and for one radio station, listeners’ spare cars). Legacy titles like the News Sentinel, Commercial Appeal and Tennessean offer an additional ace card: valuable urban real estate that once housed stables of reporters and expansive printing facilities. Creative ownership concerned with its own longevity could tap these assets in times of market turbulence (like the 2010s) to stabilize a newsroom. Along with the cost of staff salaries, real estate assets stick out on a corporate balance sheet, and offer quick, big money for an executive in need. Either way, it is a card that can be played once. 

Gannett cashed in The Tennessean’s historic 1100 Broadway site for $44.7 million in 2019, drastically downsizing to a few floors on West End and shifting its production to Knoxville. The Commercial Appeal’s offices went for $2.8 million, also in 2019, and the News Sentinel building sold in 2021 for $8.5 million, including an immediate leaseback from Gannett. Critically, The Tennessean soon ceased printing on-site. This change to the fragile logistics of daily print production pushes back deadlines and drives up distribution costs, further eating into the margins provided by dwindling print customers.

Reports of failed unionization efforts are cruel taunts so late in The Tennessean’s life. The paper is historically a non-union shop that, if organized just a couple decades earlier, could have pushed back against corporate raids. Individual print subscriptions have fallen off a cliff, down to 21,597 on Sunday (its most-subscribed day) and 14,523 on Tuesday (its least), according to the Alliance for Audited Media. Those numbers are roughly half what they were three years ago, and in January 2022, The Tennessean stopped publishing a Saturday edition. Ten years ago, it sold 214,072 Sunday papers and averaged 104,109 weekly subscribers. This consistent, sizable income stream has always represented a daily paper’s revenue backbone.

Nearly every journalist — including many interviewed for this article — couches their criticism of The Tennessean with praise for its individual writers. They emphatically defend the journalist against the structure of the industry.

“I don’t ever publicly criticize reporters,” says Holly McCall, editor-in-chief at Tennessee Lookout, which launched in late 2020. “I mean, if they publish something blatantly false, that’s one thing. But there’s not that many of us around, and the former president of the United States spent four years calling media the enemy of the people.”

It’s mostly the older journalists who like to talk about the grim, ambient cloud over print newsrooms. There was, of course, a day when The Tennessean was hiring instead of firing, and reporters jostled each other for position in crowded press conferences at the state Capitol and Metro courthouse. Few local media figures loom larger than John Seigenthaler, the journalist-editor-publisher who spent a career between The Tennessean and the White House, representing a time when papers were not gutted for assets but feared by the corrupt and powerful. A former local writer once described to me a vibrant war of pranks and hijinks between the more liberal Tennessean and its conservative-leaning evening daily competitor, the Nashville Banner — with whom it shared a building at 1100 Broadway — to illustrate Nashville media’s good old days.

There was a time, of course, when chain-smoking reporters cupped their hands over desk phones to yell across the newsroom. Like most powerful institutions then, these rooms were dominated by white men and owned by powerful individuals and families. They also nourished a large crop of writers for entire careers. More writers in stable careers meant more questions being asked, more calls being made, and competition that produced new, interesting, important angles and fresh stories for the benefit of the city.

It’s not difficult to find comprehensive and informative stories on how the internet and corporate raiders blew up the news business. Google it. Every year, tenured journalists at The Atlantic or Politico or the Times (of L.A. or New York) lament the collapse of local information ecosystems, the plague of ignorance that follows and how all of society suffers for it. While it’s likely comforting for media veterans to point to how things were before, their stories and nostalgia distill into just one useful lesson: Get more journalists.

“Launching as the Banner, I don’t have to spend a year telling people who we are,” says Steve Cavendish. Hired out of Belmont University as a cub reporter at the Banner, Cavendish has been in and out of award-winning newsrooms across the country. In 1995 he left the Banner — which was sold off to Gannett and then closed in the late ’90s — but Cavendish landed back in Nashville at now-defunct The City Paper in 2011. He moved over to the Scene in 2013. Cavendish left amid forced layoffs from former Scene owner Southcomm in 2017. Launched this year as a website and newsletter, his revamp of the Banner reflects a personal mission to rebuild a competitive news ecosystem in Nashville and an incurable curiosity about the business side of news.

“The nonprofit news community around the country has been excellent at sharing information, best practices and mistakes,” says Cavendish. “One thing we’ve learned is to launch with scale, and quality news is expensive. You have to pay people a decent wage, you have to support them, you have to give them benefits, you have to do whatever else. It is also expensive in the sense that you are paying for stories that you will never, ever run. This is important, and a lot of people don’t understand this about the news business.”

Along with Demetria Kalodimos, a locally beloved longtime news staple at WSMV-TV, and interns Connor Daryani and Addison Wright, Cavendish has been covering local elections on the Banner’s new website, which went live July 1. (The Banner and the Scene currently have a partnership under which the Scene republishes some of the Banner’s reporting.) The Banner is more than three-quarters of the way to its $2 million fundraising goal, which will allow the site to officially launch as a nonprofit news organization with a 10-person staff. Part of Cavendish’s pitch to donors is that public relations professionals outnumber journalists in Nashville 6 to 1.

The States Newsroom, which runs nonprofit outlets across the country, approached McCall in late 2020 about starting its Tennessee operation. She accepted and got commits from Rau and veteran investigative reporter Anita Wadhwani from The Tennessean. Hires like Tennessean photographer John Partipilo, Sam Stockard (who spent decades as a print reporter in Murfreesboro) and newcomer Adam Friedman have built out a formidable staff that’s led on Tennessee General Assembly coverage and broken important stories across the state. She takes support from the national States Newsroom but has fundraised herself to hire and keep more reporters.

“Some people are probably liable to view us with some skepticism,” says McCall, whose media career frequently criss-crossed into Democratic politics — including a run for state House in 2016 and work for Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign in 2020. “So I hired good reporters. We break solid stories that are true, factual and important, even if people don’t always like them. We’ve done that since day one — day three, actually, when Anita broke a story about Gov. Lee allowing law enforcement to get people’s COVID records.” 

The massive news metamorphosis of the Internet Age suggests that the for-profit model must die for journalism to live. Advertisers have cheaper, better placement on Google and Facebook, and readers fill their information vacuum by scrolling on socials, the junk food of media. Reader behavior is changing, slowly. The New York Times is the rare legacy property to succeed in this moment, which they’ve done by becoming the Amazon of information. Acquisitions of rising-star niche outfits like The Athletic and Wirecutter, along with expansions in NYT Cooking and games, have allowed one city’s paper to tell the country how to cook, who to read, what to play, who to root for, what to buy and where to travel. Such a diverse portfolio of information can subsidize the paper’s best-in-class news gathering, which makes up a decreasing share of total revenue. Aided by alarming headlines almost every day of the Trump administration, digital subscriptions are way up.

New and refurbished outlets have sprouted up in Nashville, setting up modest shops with specific missions. More individuals paying closer attention to local politics are trying hard to get correct and useful information to the public.

Henry Walker, the Scene’s former media critic, hosts a semiregular media salon at his home on Benton Avenue, a stately red brick American Foursquare furnished like an art gallery — the spoils of a career in corporate law, not journalism, he assures me.

“Stories are generated by grizzled old editors who consume news and have friends and sources,” says Walker from his front porch. “Who are those people now?”

Three retired reporters join us on a recent Thursday: Chris Bundgaard (formerly of WKRN-TV), Ed Cromer (formerly of the Banner and founding writer of the Tennessee Journal) and Tom Humphrey (former Nashville bureau chief of the Knoxville News Sentinel). Humphrey brought pickled squash. 

“Every day, they should have a microphone in Bill Lee’s face asking what he’s going to do about the Covenant shooting,” Bundgaard says. “Does he have the votes? Let’s see the bill.”

“Well, one of the problems with the lack of good reporting is that you don’t know what’s going on,” Cromer chimes in. “We don’t know what we’re not reading about.”

Walker, who was hired by and fired by the Scene multiple times throughout his tenure as media critic in the 1990s, embraced the irreverent alt-weekly’s perch as Nashville’s court jester. He took regular shots at the city’s print giants, The Tennessean and the Banner, and the city’s host of TV news channels, in his popular column, “Desperately Seeking the News.” He joins Cromer, Bundgaard and Humphrey in lamenting Nashville’s current media environment. Then he heaps praise on Scene contributor Nicole Williams.

Under the Twitter handle @startleseasily, Williams started covering (though she wouldn’t call it that) Metro Council meetings virtually during the days of COVID, when everyone was at home all the time. She watched and watched, gleaning interpersonal and policy dramas playing out on obscure city boards and commissions and, of course, Tuesday night council meetings. She had a lot to say, and she said it — she was the only one saying it, and it was important. In late 2021, the Scene gave her “On First Reading,” a Metro Council recap and analysis column, and she’s published it since.

Williams has filed straight news on occasion, but her day job is at a law firm. In her words, she is not a journalist. She does not shy from a Twitter spat and has explicitly endorsed candidates for elected office. But, observes Walker, her charm comes from her voice, and her credibility comes from the sheer scale of information Williams has accumulated watching Metro function up close for thousands of hours. Lots of information on Twitter is wrong, but the platform can give anyone a platform. The same holds for DIY outlets like Substack, where (with assistance from Williams) I briefly published a local politics newsletter called Public Comment that turned into a full-time position at the Scene in 2022.

Our small weekly was built largely under the ownership of editor Bruce Dobie and publisher Albie Del Favero in the 1990s. Back then, the Scene specialized in compelling longer-form dramas, specifically when revealing the machinations of Nashville’s rich, famous, powerful or proud. Unlike the traditional journalist objectives of major dailies, the Scene elevated a writer’s voice. 

“Dobie told us that we didn’t have an editorial page because all our pieces were editorials,” Walker remembers.

The paper changed hands multiple times since Dobie and Del Favero left in the early 2000s. Wealthy businessman Bill Freeman, founder and owner of property management company Freeman Webb, acquired the paper with his business partner, the late Jimmy Webb, via Freeman Webb in May 2018. Freeman’s single conceit is a weekly opinion letter that operates independently of the Scene’s news coverage. FW Publishing has lost excellent journalists too — Erica Ciccarone, Geert De Lombaerde, Steven Hale, Nancy Floyd, J.R. Lind and Amanda Haggard left in the past three years, among others.

While the Banner returns from the dead, new outlets and new voices pop up. Nashville Noticias has become the dominant Spanish-language news operation in Nashville and the surrounding region, counting an audience that reaches into the hundreds of thousands. Veronica Salcedo works out of a tiny office-studio in Plaza Mariachi recording spots for media giant Univision and managing Noticias’ coverage across social media platforms.

“Our first big story was the snowstorm in the winter of 2015,” Salcedo tells the Scene via a translator. “Soon people started to see us as more professional, so we got more organized. We started with just a laptop that used to overheat. Now Hispanic people call us constantly to relay news of what’s happening around their neighborhood.” Salcedo was a journalist in northern Mexico before moving to Nashville in 2015. Along with her ex-husband, she started building Noticias for the Spanish-speaking community in Nashville.

“What I do for the community, a lot of it is just explaining,” says Salcedo. “When I moved here, I had to learn the rules and the laws that govern Tennessee and the U.S. Now I inform my community of those rules and laws about everyday life in the United States.”

Noticias is everywhere in Nashville. Salcedo recalls being among the first to be on the scene to cover the Covenant School shooting and takes pride in how closely she works with the Spanish-speaking community. Noticias covers lost pets, funerals, house fires, wage theft and traffic accidents. She generates revenue via sponsored posts and ads, often for local grocery stores, restaurants and legal aid. But on occasion, her stories are more clickbait than relevant news.

Clickbait consumes today’s TV stations (and increasingly The Tennessean), like stories about specific incidents of violent crime and mugshots of recent arrests. Such headlines — more public shaming than journalism — get traffic even though they’re largely irrelevant to a viewer’s daily life, doing more to feed racism and fear than to educate or inform. Even so, NewsChannel 5’s Phil Williams still dogs politicians and produces excellent reporting for the evening news. His unit has shown signs of journalistic innovation — last week, NC5’s Levi Ismail published an entire investigative story about the Millersville Police on social media.

While a handful of new outlets have spent the past few years building credibility and establishing followings, just one has weathered a rocky business environment only to emerge stronger, bigger, better staffed and an undisputed leader in its field.

Meribah Knight’s Pulitzer nomination for her coverage of Rutherford County’s juvenile court system (with ProPublica’s Ken Armstrong) was a remarkable nod from one of the toughest categories of the highest prize in journalism. Nashville’s NPR affiliate, WPLN-FM, was close to recognition as one of the best news operations in the country. It has managed to stay on the record every day about news across the state while building out deeply reported stories and podcasts. Its latest daily show, This Is Nashville, hosted by Khalil Ekulona, already commands a staff of seven.

NPR’s national desk frequently borrowed Blake Farmer’s health care stories, and WNYC, America’s radio juggernaut, quickly recruited Nashville’s criminal justice reporter Samantha Max last year. WPLN has grown and grown, yet also struggled to retain its best talent — Max of course, but also state legislature reporter Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, enterprise reporter Damon Mitchell, news director Emily Siner and Metro reporter Ambriehl Crutchfield. Crutchfield, who is Black, publicly questioned the organization’s ability to retain reporters of color, and in a parting tweet, cited “not feeling heard internally” as a reason for her departure. Two months after Crutchfield left, her reporting on maintenance neglect by property manager Freeman Webb at Riverchase Apartments won a 2023 Edward R. Murrow Award. Crutchfield declined the Scene’s request for comment on her departure. State politics veteran Chas Sisk left this year, along with Farmer, who went to the private sector. Vice president of content (and general editor) Anita Bugg recently resigned in the middle of a meeting after nearly three decades at the station. On July 24, senior producer Anna Gallegos-Cannon announced on Twitter she was leaving WPLN.

“People have left for a variety of different reasons,” says a source familiar with the newsroom. “We’ve grown, and lots of changes happen with growth.”

Still, inside radio’s morass of evangelical and partisan talk programs, WPLN rules local news. Its nonprofit model means semiregular fundraising marathons — a small price to pay for the many Nashvillians whose car dials stay stuck on 90.3.

While Nashville figures itself out, there has been more news than ever. Astronomical population growth has brought the usual laundry list of growing pains — transit and traffic, housing affordability, booming real estate demographic changes — along with major corporate relocations, like Amazon and Oracle. A hyper-partisan political environment between the city and state makes Middle Tennessee a litmus test between parties for all kinds of nationally relevant issues. Nashville’s country music bona fides combine a Hollywood shininess with an Americana authenticity. People love it.

Ten years after a New York Times reporter called Nashville the “it” city, national media still harbors a healthy appetite for Middle Tennessee and covers us regularly. Emily Nussbaum gave the country a Nashville update with her July 24 New Yorker piece “Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville,” which follows Paige Williams’ 2019 “Letter From Nashville,”  in the same magazine about hot chicken and the Prince family. Henry Hicks IV, a 2017 graduate of the University School of Nashville and a 2020 Truman Scholar, wrote on the Tennessee Three for In These Times’ July cover story. Last year, Fox News blasted its spin on Harpeth Hall’s gender-inclusion policy to the entire country. Far-right mega-outlet The Daily Wire moved here from Los Angeles in 2020, eager to associate its brand identity with Tennessee conservatism. Restrictive, aggressive and ideologically inconsistent lawmaking from the state legislature regularly gets written up in national print media when the legislature is in session. After setting up Rick Rojas as its one-person Nashville bureau in 2021, The New York Times sent him back to Atlanta. Arguing its national significance, Rojas got the Times to send in a full-time replacement, Emily Cochrane, who was immediately busy covering the statehouse and the Covenant School shooting.

Regardless of political affiliation, people across the country see themselves in Nashville. So do those who live here. The news industry has changed everywhere, shedding old-school reporters and collapsing traditional newsrooms. Journalism has also democratized, lending bylines and recorders to a younger, more diverse class of reporters who command information across print, audio and video. The rules are the same: Be honest and fair to everyone involved. Check your bias. Don’t lie or misrepresent facts. Afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted, give voice to the voiceless, and know a decent lawyer for questions about slander or libel. Like any good story, everyone wants to know what happens next.

Correction: A previous version of this article noted that Anna Gallegos-Cannon was at WPLN for five years (she was there for two), and that This Is Nashville featured a staff of six rather than seven. We apologize for the errors.