This review was originally posted on June 18, 2000 and has been substantially rewritten here.

Being raised in Middle Tennessee, I grew up during a period when the capital city of Nashville had two newspapers: The Tennessean and the Nashville Banner. The Banner generally represented conservative Republican politics; The Tennessean, a more liberal slant. Interestingly, the papers were housed in the same building on Broadway on the edge of downtown. (I would have loved to have heard some of those political arguments.)

After the Banner went under, media magnet Gannett gobbled up The Tennessean and renamed it The Nashville Tennessean. For years, John Seigenthaler, Sr. was associated with the paper as editor and publisher. Today, Ellen Leifield is the President and Publisher of the highly successful paper with John Gibson in the role as reader editor.

Gannett changed the appearance of the Nashville Tennessean leading it away from the traditional look of the New York Times to look more like its highly successful national USA Today paper. With this change in appearance has come more photography, more human interest reporting, and a great interest in local entertainment news.

This last point sometimes is an irritant as the traditional reader might be accustomed to seeing national news in section A, pages 2 and 3. Instead, the Nashville Tennessean tends to have celebrity birthdays, local gossip on the music and entertainment industry (you know we do have a lot of big stars here) and just a National Briefs section and one key international story. In previous years, the international story would have been front page headline.

Could one pick up the front page of this newspaper and know what was happening in the world scope? The answer would depend on the importance of what is happening on the world scene. An event like 9/11 would obviously be front page. But one would not see the latest explosion in Iraq on the front page of this paper. On Sunday, the paper has 10 sections. One would find lesser important news on the front page of one of those sections, but not on the front page. They most always lead with some local happening or human interest story.

Their sports and business coverage is excellent with national and state stories, great coverage of seasonal sports events, Tennessee Titan, Predator, and Grizzly coverage as well as line scores from baseball, etc. Their business news is dominated by companies of local interest. On Friday, they have an in depth section focusing on movies and entertainment news with numerous well-written movie reviews. However, I must warn you that traditionally, their reviewers usually pick apart movies pretty severely.

The paper, especially Sunday’s edition, has a lot of advertising. That particularly paper, which is generally about two inches thick, could be whittled down to about a quarter inch if all the advertising were eliminated. But then again, they couldn’t afford to publish without all the ads. And just think of all those savings on Sunday coupons you get! I generally get enough in coupons on Sunday to pay for the paper.

The Nashville Tennessean also has an excellent web site (www.tennessean.com) which I often peruse during the week in order to keep up with information that I might have missed on the local newscast. However, when I lived in Austin, Texas and was covering Tennessee for the company, I would read it first thing every day to keep up with political and educational news in the state. It was a tremendous asset for territory management.

The website has many links to news stories, but it also comes with a great deal of advertisement. The archive is limited, so if there is a story that appears for which you have interest, it is better to go ahead and make a copy of it as you might have difficulty finding it a week later.

The editorial policy of the paper has become to engage multiple opinions on local and national political happenings. While the paper will take positions and endorse candidates, they also have a wide variety of nationally recognized editorials from distinguished journalists like Cal Thomas, William Safire, Molly Ivins, and Dwight Lewis. At least these are some of the national Op/Ed pieces that have appeared in the past. They still have a somewhat liberal slant as they tend to give a great deal of attention to the Democratic side of stories, but since this is a state that voted twice for George Bush, they can’t afford to completely alienate those supporters.

The paper also fails to do one thing that a good state paper would do: they tend to ignore the other three major cities in the state unless it is something really bad. So in order to get information about Knoxville, Memphis, or Chattanooga I have to go to their papers on-line. I think the Nashville Tennessean could be a better state paper were their segments giving attention to issues in those cities. The paper, however, has generally purchased most of the small papers in neighboring communities and will publish editions just for those communities. This does provide great insight on local issues in neighboring counties.

Overall, the Nashville Tennessean is a worthy newspaper. As many papers are today, it is more in keeping with the national trend for newspapers to become instruments of advertisement with a hefty dose of entertainment and gossip. But reading this paper will give one a good measure of what is happening in many segments of today’s society around the globe.


Recommended: Yes

Describe the newspaper's political views: It is moderate