When I moved here in 1987, Nashville had two daily newspapers: a morning paper, The Tennessean, whose editorial page leaned left; and an evening paper, the Nashville Banner, whose editorial page leaned right. I still subscribe to The Tennessean, but the Banner is long gone. In 1998, The Tennessean bought its longtime competitor and shut it down.
I recall with fondness that venerable newspaper, no matter that its editorial page did not align with my own politics. Some of the local journalists I most admire got their start at the Banner. And a city with competing newsrooms, each determined to get the news first and to get it right, is protected by a powerful bulwark against extremism and governmental mischief. In a democracy, the only way to be sure there isn’t a fox watching the henhouse is to set a whole bunch of reporters the task of watching the foxes.
Today less than a dozen U.S. cities have two competing daily newspapers, and many communities have no local news source at all. Nashville, like many other midsize cities, still has television news channels, an alternative newsweekly (the Nashville Scene) and various online publications to do some of that henhouse-watching. Nevertheless, the combined ranks of reporters covering crucial beats like state and local politics, education, criminal justice and the like, are dramatically smaller than they were in the days when the Tennessean and the Banner, each fully staffed and fully funded, were scrapping for scoops.
It’s hard to conceive of a local newspaper, in print or online, that’s fully staffed and fully funded anymore. Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the country, owns the daily newspaper in three of the four largest Tennessee cities, including The Tennessean in Nashville. In 2019 it fought off a hostile takeover by a predatory hedge fund but later in the same year was forced to merge with another fund-backed company.
The fallout has been catastrophic: dozens of newspapers shuttered, more than half the staff jettisoned, journalists in revolt — the list goes on and on. “The scale of local news destruction in Gannett’s markets is astonishing,” reads the headline on an analysis by Joshua Benton for Harvard’s Neiman Lab last year. And Gannett’s plundering of its own newspapers’ resources is far from the only trouble facing the news industry.
Into this media landscape, the veteran Nashville journalist Steve Cavendish has launched a 21st century Nashville Banner as a daily online source of local news. The new Banner shares nothing with the old Banner but the name and a commitment to local journalism. Like the Tennessee Lookout, a daily digital publication that began operations in 2020, and WPLN News, Nashville’s NPR affiliate, the new Banner is not locked behind a paywall. Also like the Lookout and WPLN — as well as outlets like the Daily Memphian and MLK50 in Memphis — the new Banner is a nonprofit newsroom. Mr. Cavendish believes that difference represents the future of viable local journalism: “The only successful startups at the local level in the last 20 years have been on the nonprofit side,” he told me in a phone interview.
I first met Mr. Cavendish when he was editor of the Nashville City Paper, an alternative newsweekly, and I was editor of Chapter 16, a nonprofit source of Tennessee-related literary coverage. Chapter 16 provides book reviews and author interviews, without charge, to newspaper partners across the state. The City Paper, once one of its partners, no longer exists. Chapter 16 is doing fine.
Another difference between the new Banner and newspapers of old is that Demetria Kalodimos, a renowned Nashville broadcast journalist, serves as the organization’s executive producer. She also heads up its video division and is the host of its weekly podcast.
Already Ms. Kalodimos and her team have created a number of mini documentaries, including one based on vintage footage of civil rights demonstrations in Nashville. In 1960, a Fisk University student, Diane Nash, confronted Mayor Ben West outside the Nashville courthouse. In their exchange he admitted that he recognized the injustice of segregation. Shortly thereafter, Nashville became the first major city in the South to desegregate its lunch counters. The Banner video provides historical context to a news report about Ms. Nash’s return to Nashville on April 20 to speak at a ceremony marking the renaming of the historic courthouse plaza in her honor.
Black history has once again become a contentious issue in the South, with revisionist politicians passing legislation that limits how race can be taught, or even discussed, in schools. In the Banner’s package on Diane Nash, video and news reports work together to provide a straightforward account of historical facts and their ramifications today. There is nothing that could possibly be called partisan about either piece.
That’s by design. Hoping to avoid partisan rancor, Mr. Cavendish and Ms. Kalodimos have positioned the new Banner as a strictly-news publication, without editorials, op-eds, or candidate endorsements. “All the money that we have, we’re putting into news reporting,” Mr. Cavendish said. “Because we want so much in terms of news.”
Even so, avoiding partisan accusations will be a challenge in this Republican-supermajority state. Donald Trump spent his presidency calling journalists the enemy of the people, and hostility toward the press is a hallmark of the MAGA movement. A label like nonpartisan is unlikely to change that attitude.
But Nashville — progressive, vibrant, growing — may be the best place to break through hyperpartisan fury. If old school public-service journalism can make it anywhere, it can make it here. In that sense, the new Banner is not in competition with other equally necessary news organizations in the city. It’s another much needed element in a journalistic network working to repair the atomized landscape of local news.
There is still, of course, the constant question of money. Even with the financial support of institutions like the MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Institute for Nonprofit News and the American Journalism Project, among others, nonprofit newsrooms survive only when they have the financial support of their readers and listeners. And in this era of proliferating websites and podcasts and videos and newsletters, not even to mention the unceasing social media updates from journalists and “citizen journalists,” engaging an audience long enough to count on its loyalty, much less its dollars, may be the greatest challenge of all.
It can sometimes feel like a job, keeping up with all this news.
Perhaps it feels like a job because it is a job. The work of democracy, the responsibility of democracy, is to be an informed citizen, a person whose news sources are wide and varied and committed to getting at the truth, no matter how assiduously our elected officials work to obscure it. The worst thing that could happen to democracy — especially in red states like Tennessee, where government is not remotely working on behalf of its own people, and often can’t even be bothered to respond to them — is for local journalism to fall apart.
In Nashville as in nearly everywhere else where it survives at all, local news has already come perilously close to falling apart. But the Nashville Banner, a long-dead local newspaper, has formally rejoined the world as a nonpartisan, nonprofit digital newsroom, and that’s the best news for local democracy that I’ve heard in a long, long time.
The Banner is dead. Long live the Banner.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing New York Times Opinion writer, is the author of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times.