Editor’s note: The Banner commissioned this piece by Phillips to coincide with the launch of Banner & Company, our new podcast. The first episode, which features former Banner staffers talking about the history of the newspaper is available now everywhere you get your podcasts. We’ll feature outtakes from those interviews throughout this story.
Picture this: A group of friends and investors sit around talking about how Nashville needs another newspaper — one with a bold approach to news, but also steeped in the history of the city. What if they called it The Banner? No one was using that name at the moment, right?
The year is 20 — wait, wait.
What you’re reading now is the product of meetings very much like the one I just described. But in this case, I meant the first time the Banner name was resurrected. That happened in 1876, the year most often cited as the start of the Nashville Banner. But that’s actually some 55 years after the Banner was first born. Like many journalistic enterprises, the Banner’s path to the present day is full of twists and turns, mergers, acquisitions, colorful editors, and at least one gun duel.
Early history
The National Banner, as it was called then, was established in 1822. The masthead would look familiar to anyone who knows the Banner name — the somewhat fancy and gothic lettering, complemented by an angry eagle carrying an American flag in its beak. Written on a ribbon beneath the bird was the phrase “Fidus et Audax” — usually translated as “Loyal and Bold,” but the National Banner probably meant it more in the sense of “Truthful and Bold,” two good qualities in a newspaper.
In 1826, the paper merged with The Nashville Whig and for the next four years, it was called The National Banner and Nashville Whig. After a sale, it became The National Banner and Daily Advertiser in 1830. Then in 1834, the publishers gave up and declared, “having become convinced, from an experiment of nearly three years, that a Daily Paper cannot be profitably published in Nashville, we shall hereafter issue this paper only three times a week.” By the end of the 1830s, apparently there was more news happening in the city and the paper was once again a daily, but with another new name: The Republican Banner.
Seminole War hero and Whig Party bigwig, Felix K. Zollicoffer, worked his first stint as editor with this iteration of the Banner from January 3, 1842 to August 11, 1843. He turned the paper into the house organ of the Whig Party during this time. He returned to the paper at the beginning of 1851 when he purchased an interest and became editor. Zollicoffer, and thus the Banner, was loudly against presidential candidate Franklin Pierce, who Zollicoffer accused of not being pro-slavery. John Marling, the editor of the Nashville Union, was so outraged by Zollicoffer’s stance that Marling accused Zollicoffer of behaving dishonorably toward Pierce, because Marling believed that Pierce was pro-slavery, just quiet about it. In what seems to have been a custom of Nashville newspaper editors, Marling published an epic poem in the Nashville Union, on November 21, 1851, containing the lines, “The despot has no truce to offer / When backed by General Zollicoffer.” Back and forth bickering on the editorial pages of both papers continued throughout 1852 until coming to a head in August. On August 20, Zollicoffer published some very snarky comments about Marling: “The Union says– ‘Gen. Pierce proved himself throughout his Congressional career, an ardent friend of the revolutionary soldier.’ This will be gratifying news to the Union’s democratic contemporaries, who have not been so fortunate as to find it out, but it will be much more gratifying to them if it can show the votes and speeches of Gen. Pierce proving it. We should really like to see them ourself.”
It was what you’d expect if you’ve ever seen “The Front Page.” It was blue smoke in the air from the cigarettes. They frowned on cigars. But, there were still a lot of smokers. The typewriters would sound like machine guns going off. And so it was all there. Computers didn’t come in until about a year or so later. It was loud. When I dream about newspapers — which is still once every couple of weeks — it’s always that old newsroom.
Pat Embry, who joined the Banner in 1979 as a sports writer and was the last executive editor.
At the same time this edition of the Banner was hitting the streets, the two editors were shooting at each other in front of the Union’s offices on Cherry Street. Marling stood in front of his paper and Zollicoffer stood across the street in front of the post office. They were right in the heart of the commercial district downtown and within sight of the state capitol. Whether or not this was an official duel is up for debate. Other outlets claimed it was, since clearly both men came to meet each other in the street with guns. But nothing in either paper verifies this one way or another. What we do know is that Zollicoffer met Marling in the street and publicly denounced him. Marling then fired his pistol at Zollicoffer, who shot back, lodging a bullet behind Marling’s ear. Marling then shot Zollicoffer, grazing his hand. They both lived.
The incident was not mentioned in the Banner, but the next day the Union’s coverage of the event started, “During the confinement of Mr. Marling, the paper will be under the Editorial control of Mr. Irving, the Assistant Editor.” The piece then goes on to outline the injuries to both men and states, “The immediate cause of the difficulty was the following article which appeared in the Union of yesterday.”
Yes, that’s right. The Union ran the offending piece again the day after the shooting, just in case readers wanted to be brought up to speed on the Banner’s sins. “[The Banner] has even cast slurs upon [Pierce’s] personal courage. Now we say this is belieing General Pierce. We use this word in all its length and breadth. It is shameless misrepresentation. It is falsifying records of the country. It is traducing and blackening the fame of a true, brave and gallant man.”
Zollicoffer “withdrew from the paper on April 20, 1853,” after he started his first stint in the U.S. House of Representatives. Coincidentally, he and Pierce both started serving in their elected positions the same year. Later, Zollicoffer served as a General in the Confederate Army until January 19, 1862, when he blundered into Union lines and was killed.
Like every other paper in the city, the Republican Banner shut down during the War. But it resumed publication after the War, and provided press time to a number of smaller publishing endeavors. After more mergers and changes in ownership, by the mid-1870s, the Republican Banner was consolidated with the paper that had emerged out of the old Union, the Union and American, and the Banner was no more. Many of the editors and pressmen went on to found the American, the precursor to the Tennessean. For about a year the name lay dormant, and then John J. Carter, W.E. Eastman, C.P. Bledsoe, Humes Carothers, Pleasant J. Wright, and R. J. Miller introduced the Nashville Banner on April 10, 1876. Generally speaking, this is the date people tend to think of as the beginning of the Banner, and it is the start of its most enduring incarnation to date. Three of the founders of this iteration retired by the end of the year. In 1882, Ira P. Jones and H.M. Doak purchased an interest in the paper and Doak became editor-in-chief.
Henry Melville Doak was born in 1841 and served in the Confederate Army. He fought at the same battle where General Zollicoffer was killed. Once out of the military, Doak went into journalism. This was only natural, as he possessed many of the traits that made a good newspaperman of the era: He wrote poetry; he loved Shakespeare; and he was a bit of an eccentric. In 1922, Doak gave the Tennessee Historical Society a desk-sized cannon that he claimed had belonged to the Kentucky abolitionist Cassius Clay, which Clay had kept sitting on his desk so that he could shoot any pro-slavery parties who might make it through his door. According to Doak, Clay gave the cannon to William G. Terrell, a reporter for the Cincinatti Commercial who later befriended Doak and gave it to him. Legend has it that Doak kept the cannon on the front porch of his house in Bordeaux and would fire it in the direction of his hometown of Clarksville when his personal friend, President Roosevelt, did something he liked. Whether this was a warning to Clarksville or some kind of celebratory noise is unclear. Though the desk cannon was large enough to ensure pro-slavery activists who entered Clay’s office would have a bad day, it was much, much too small to provide any real danger to Clarksville or for the city to even hear when it had been fired.
Like many journalists of this era, Doak flipped back and forth between the Banner and the American/Tennessean. He left the Banner for the editor-in-chief position at the American (though he must have had a stop in Memphis because when he ran the Memphis Avalanche, he got in a fistfight with a local lawyer, which made the papers), but later he had a genealogy and history column in the Banner. When he died, both the Banner and the Tennessean ran his obituary on the front pages of their papers. Contrary to the reputations of the two papers, the Tennessean’s obituary focused mainly on how awesome Doak’s service during the Civil War was, while the Banner gave a fuller picture of the man. The Banner also used its obituary to scoop the Tennessean by revealing that Doak, who had left journalism to serve as the clerk of the federal court here in Nashville had been doing so illegally–for forty-two years. The Banner reported that Doak told friends, “Of course, I knew that I was not eligible for appointment as clerk of a federal court. Congress had passed an act making all Confederate officers who had been on the high seas merchant ships pirates and outlaws, never to be citizens of the United States again or to hold any federal office. Some Yankee had looked up my record and it said I was a pirate. The truth is that I had done considerable cruising on the high seas on various Confederate ships and knew of my disabilities, and I said nothing.” Considering the length of the quote and the detail in it, one could surmise that the friends who had heard this story were, in fact, Banner staff.
My grandfather [J.D. Norman, Sr.] ran circulation and worked for the Banner for over 40 years. He was fascinated by the business side. And the Banner gave a young man with only an eighth-grade education a chance to grow professionally. … I remember, at an early age, seeing these types of money bags and seeing all types of coins and counting the coins from the newspaper racks. Which is where I learned to love math, was counting coins with my grandfather around his kitchen table. … I [got] rare coins that I’ve now kept over the years — you know, buffalo head, nickels, silver quarters, mercury dimes — that he would always teach me the integrity of replacing the coin with a normal coin. Now we are the beneficiaries of fantastic coin collections from all those years of working for him.
— Jeff Haynes
The Stahlman era
Edward Bushrod Stahlman was a German-born railroad man who was vice president of the Louisville & Nashville railroad when he bought the Banner in 1885. The Stahlman family ran the paper for decades, and it became particularly known for being very racist under their reign.
Many critics point to Stahlman’s brother-in-law having been a Klansman as the original sin of the family. Not to defend the Stahlmans, but one would be hard-pressed to find a family with Confederate ancestors that did not also have Klansmen ancestors. More important to understanding the editorial stance of the paper is that Stahlman was a railroad man and the racial issues of the South were fundamentally labor issues. Many white Southerners had gotten rich off the theft of Black labor and even if they were no longer allowed to legally completely steal that labor, they had a vested interest in keeping the price of that labor as low as possible. The racial issues were labor issues and vice versa. You couldn’t extract one from the other. The paper, in the late 1880s, is permeated both with anxiety about whether Black people will leave town and the South if they aren’t better, and excuses and threats about why they won’t be treated better. On June 5, 1880, the paper ran a story in which it reported “the conditions of the people and the country of Tennessee as very prosperous. There is no war of races there, as civil rights are accorded the negro as fully as in the North. The talk of a few radicals as to the color line is all false and contrary to facts.” Note that the paper doesn’t claim that Black people in the South are accorded civil rights as fully as white people in the South. Also, conditions for Black people in the north weren’t great.
Two decades into this version of the Banner, in 1907, Col. Luke Lea started the Tennessean, which almost immediately became the bane of Stahlman’s existence. On paper, the Banner was in a much stronger position than the upstart Tennessean, especially financially. But Lea became determined to bring Stahlman down after he and the Banner successfully argued for Lea’s ouster from the U.S. Senate.
That wasn’t Lea’s only motivation, though. He was such an anti-German bigot that his Teutophobia led him to some truly wild extremes. At the start of World War I, Lea tried to frame Stahlman as anti-American and have him declared an “alien enemy,” and after the war, 1919, Lea tried to kidnap the exiled Kaiser. Both the kidnapping and the frame job failed, but the bottom line was that now Stahlman had an archenemy. As a result, whatever positions Lea and the Tennessean took, Stahlman and the Banner reflexively took the opposite. The popular election of U.S. senators, Prohibition, women’s suffrage — all saw the Tennessean in favor and the Banner firmly against.
In 1920, anti-suffragists had even planned to blackmail Harry Burn into changing his pro-suffrage vote by threatening to run a story in the Banner about how he had been bribed to vote for women’s right to vote, thus ruining his reputation and career. Unfortunately for the schemers, the stenographer taking the “witness” “statements” slipped a copy of the transcript to the Tennessean and the morning paper ran the story of the blackmail scheme before the blackmailers could run their bribe story in the afternoon paper.
Around this time, Edward Stahlman’s grandson, James Geddes Stahlman, graduated from Vanderbilt and began writing for the Banner. This Stahlman is the Stahlman who looms largest over the legacy of the Banner. So, let’s talk about the 1930s.
In 1930, Edward Stahlman died, and, in a bit of foreshadowing of the contradiction that would soon stand at the heart of the paper, Fred Russell became sports editor for the Banner, where he would become one of the most well-respected sports writers in the country, doing truly innovative journalism at a paper with a backward-looking and often embarrassing editorial stance. A year later, in 1931, Tennessean founder Luke Lea was indicted for his role in the collapse of the Asheville, North Carolina, Central Bank and Trust. After Lea was sent to prison in 1937, The Tennessean went into receivership and was eventually sold at auction. That same year, James and his uncle, Frank Stahlman, became co-owners of the Banner. This would prove to be hugely consequential for the future of the paper and in some ways start a clock on the end of the Banner.
One of James’s first acts as the paper’s owner and publisher was to help Silliman Evans Sr. buy the Tennessean and then to agree for the papers to join forces in order to save them both money — sort of. Ownership and the editorial voice of each paper would remain separate, but they operated out of the same building, sharing business and production staff. Former Tennessean writer E. Thomas Wood traces the eventual downfall of this iteration of the Banner to this moment.
Writing in the Business Nashville magazine after the Banner closed its doors in 1998, Wood relates:
“In retrospect, the Banner’s fate may well have been sealed when it entered into its joint operating agreement with The Nashville Tennessean in 1937. Under the JOA, the papers shared business resources while remaining competitive editorially. The Banner was the stronger paper then; the Tennessean was emerging from bankruptcy. Yet it was the Banner that dropped its Sunday edition under the terms of the agreement, leaving its rival with what would become a valuable monopoly.”
The newsrooms were right across the hall from each other, and in competition, and I had been in another city where there were two newspapers — El Paso. And they certainly had the same printing company, but they weren’t nearly as close. Well, at the Banner, you shared everything, including restrooms. You had to be very careful. When you went into the restroom, you couldn’t talk if there were others from The Tennessean. NBC actually did a white paper — one of their white papers on journalism — about the situation with the newsrooms.
— Elise McMillian, former reporter, city editor in general counsel
If this was the poison pill that killed the Banner, though, it was a very slow-acting one. The Banner survived, and produced arguably some of its most important work, for more than a half century under this model.
As a result, James Stahlman would have decades to try to shape the city in his racist vision. For one, Stahlman and the Banner opposed school integration in the 1950s, going so far as to calling for an amendment to the Constitution that stipulated that public school systems should only be under state and local jurisdiction in July 1957, right before Nashville began to desegregate public schools. In an editorial, the paper explained, “The amendment in question would in no sense bar integration of the schools, where that is the wish of the states. They would have that right, exactly as they have had all along.”
Despite his white supremacist bona fides, in 1950, Stahlman decided to hire Robert Churchwell, the first Black reporter hired full-time at a white newspaper in Nashville and one of the first in the South.
For the first five years, Churchwell had to work from home, because the Banner newsroom was segregated and he wasn’t given a desk. Even so, by the time The Tennessean got around to hiring a Black reporter, Churchwell had been working for the Banner — if not at it — for a decade. When Churchwell was posthumously awarded a Lifetime Achievement award from the Society of Professional Journalists in 2009, the Society explained that the Banner hired Churchwell not “to show its racial integration agenda, but rather as a business decision to attract black readers.” Churchwell made the most of this predicament and the Banner’s back pages filled with stories about Black Nashvillians’ lives and accomplishments, and gave white readers the experience of reading stories about Black people in which they were just people who got promoted or retired or won a ribbon at a church fair. These stories were revolutionary because they were so ordinary. Before Churchwell, stories about Black people in the Banner were mostly about how they were criminals or making them the butt of jokes. News stories that portrayed Black Nashvillians as regular people were a new experience for the Banner and for white Nashville.
Certainly, having a Black reporter on staff did nothing to lessen Stahlman’s pursuit of explicitly racist aims. In 1960, he used the paper’s bully pulpit and his position on Vanderbilt’s Board of Trust to successfully agitate for the expulsion of James Lawson from the Vanderbilt Divinity School for his work organizing and training Civil Rights activists in non-violent resistance. Still, despite their boss’s segregationist agenda, the Banner’s reporters were doing amazing work.
Reading through the Banner’s coverage of the three integration-era bombings (Hattie Cotton school in 1957, the Jewish Community Center in 1958, and the home of councilman and civil rights attorney Z. Alexander Looby) compared to The Tennessean’s coverage, it’s obvious that, even if The Tennessean’s coverage was more sympathetic to integrationist goals, the Banner’s stories were better. They had more detail, more sources, and were usually longer. Still, Stahlman’s whims carried the paper. In 1967, he tried to keep Civil Rights leader Stokely Carmichael from speaking at Vanderbilt and, after a riot broke out following the event — though it’s not clear how much the event might have spurred the riot — Stahlman assigned public blame for the riot on Vanderbilt Chancellor Alexander Heard for letting students bring Carmichael to campus.
Much of the Banner’s best work was coming out of the sports department. After sports editor Ralph McGill left the Banner for The Atlanta Constitution, where he used the paper to advocate against segregation, the aforementioned Fred Russell took over. The sports department under Russell held such future stars as Roy Neal, who served as White House Deputy Chief of Staff under Bill Clinton and Chief of Staff to Vice President Al Gore, and Buster Olney, who covered the Nashville Sounds right out of college, before eventually landing at ESPN’s Baseball Tonight. But the biggest star at the time was Fred Russell himself.
Russell was the sports editor at the Banner for much of the 68 years he worked there. During that time he was a member of the Heisman Trophy Committee, and president of the Football Writers Association of America. He published seven sports books and wrote the column “Sideline Sidelights.” The column was a showcase of Russell’s talent as a writer as well as his deep knowledge of sports and his wit. In the February 26, 1943 column, for instance, Russell was explaining why a baseball player, Charles Peter “Greek” George only played well for coach Larry Gilbert, who at the time was with the Nashville Vols minor league team. Russell wrote, “There’s nothing in baseball like the Gilbert-George relationship. It’s a story they’ll be telling a hundred years from now–provided by then the muscle jerks haven’t substituted some ‘joy-though-health’ exercise for baseball.” Perhaps Russell was psychic as well as talented.
Meanwhile, the business arrangement with The Tennessean was working well and the firewall between the two editorial departments held firm. (The Tennessean sportswriters regularly griped that coaches would hold news over the weekend until Fred Russell could run it in the Monday edition of the Banner rather than give The Tennessean the scoop.) Still, this arrangement had unintended consequences, some funny, for the city. One such consequence was that the Evans family, and thus The Tennessean, supported Daylight Saving Time. Consequently, Stahlman and the Banner did not. The building at 1100 Broadway that housed both papers had a clock out front. The Tennessean’s side of the clock sprang ahead with the time change. The Banner’s did not.
So, coming to work at the Banner, we had to be there at 5:30 in the morning. Never ever got used to that. We were competing head to head with The Tennessean and so if you had a story in the can that you’d edited the previous day or written, if The Tennessean had that story, you had to then flip it to make it a fresh story. From the time we walked in the door, we had like about two hours before the first deadline, which was the state edition. And then there was the city edition and the final. So, you come in in the morning, and I mean it was cranking for like two hours. But I enjoyed that. I really did. I enjoyed the pressure. And that’s the news business, so you gotta love it or you get out.
— Roger Shirley, former reporter and editor
End of an era
The difference of an hour would mean little in the end. Stahlman ultimately sold the Banner to the Gannett Corporation in January 1972 and retired six months later.
In 1979, Gannett bought The Tennessean and sold the Banner to Brownlee Currey, Irby C. Simpkins and John J. Hooker Jr. The next year Currey and Simpkins bought Hooker out. Currey and Simpkins maintained a commitment to the Banner’s publisher using the paper to their own ends, some of them questionable at best.
In 1984, Simpkins used the paper to promote the congressional run of his brother, Joe. But the bigger matter was how Simpkins used the paper a decade later, to help promote the career of his then-wife, then-Deputy Governor Peaches Simpkins, who for a time seemed to be on track to become governor. In late 1995, The Tennessean began to run a series of stories on how she seemed to be conducting business on behalf of a job she might take once her boss was out of office, while still at work in her state government job. Infighting at the Banner over how writers were allowed to cover Peaches’s scandals — and the way she pitched favorable stories of the Don Sundquist administration to Irby — resulted in frustration among political writers and heartburn for editors in the paper’s final years.
There were high points in the Currey/Simpkins era. Thanks to the efforts of staff photographer Larry McCormack, much of the paper’s photo archive was saved and organized in the early 1990s. In the process, McCormack discovered a treasure trove of unpublished photographs from the civil rights era, which he organized into a popular exhibit titled “Witness to the Light.” As he was matching the photos to stories from the era in the Banner and The Tennessean archives, he found that often the morning paper ran photos of protests, sit-ins and marches, while the Banner left them out of their editions. McCormack reached out to a staff photographer from the 1950s, incredulous that the pictures never made it to readers. “The Tennessean was there to cover the news,” McCormack says the photographer, now deceased, told him. “We were there for the police.”
Through the 1980s and 1990s, the Banner made hay where it could, despite its staff being less than half the size of its rival. Joe Biddle might not have been the new Fred Russell, but his columns drove the discussion as sports radio began to flourish in the market and his weekly picks contest — where readers who out-picked him on a slate of football games won “I Beat Biddle” bumper stickers — became one of the best stealth marketing campaigns. Some of those stickers, now at least 25 years old, still adorn cars in the midstate. Reporter Katherine Bouma’s scoop about Bill Boner’s extra-marital affair largely ended the mayor’s political career. Music writers like Michael McCall, Jay Orr and Michael Gray would document the rise of modern country music before becoming historians for the Country Music Hall of Fame. Reporter Tam Gordon made a living with scoops about Metro from her office in the basement of the courthouse. A string of political reporters made their bones in the Banner — Mike Pigott, David Fox, Bruce Dobie, Beth Fortune, Kriste Goad — before launching PR firms, other publications or careers in government.
The paper was also early to join the digital age, experimenting with a presence on AOL and its own website and beginning to send out an electronic digest of stories — a precursor to today’s newsletters — every afternoon. The photo staff was the second in the country to convert to all-digital cameras.
The end finally came in 1998, when Simpkins told staff that the paper was shutting down. Most Nashvillians assumed that declining circulation numbers were to blame, since Simpkins said as much both in the Banner on its last day and the next day in The Tennessean: “Our circulation went from 42,100 in September to 39,839 in January 1998.” It later came out that Gannett had, in fact, paid Simpkins and Currey $65 million to kill the Banner, presumably to prop up circulation numbers at The Tennessean. (In a filing with the SEC in 2022, Gannett reported The Tennessean’s daily circulation at 22,000 readers.) Thus the Banner died a second death. It’s worth noting, though, that the paper went down fighting: The Tennessee Press Association named it the best newspaper in the state posthumously.
For the great Fred Russell, this came just two years after the passing of his beloved wife, Kay, and the dual losses sent him into a depression. Former Tennessean editor John Seigenthaler encouraged Russell to take his talent to The Tennessean, where Russell wrote a few articles here and there, but friends noted that his heart wasn’t in it. He died a few years later at the age of 96.
As the 20th century drew to a close, The Tennessean was, by design, the only daily in town. But then came the internet, which caused a revolution in news publishing, with daily newspapers quickly showing themselves as Marie Antoinette. The Tennessean collapsed into a shell of itself, thanks to Gannett’s unwavering ability to find the most talented writers around, move them to Nashville, and then lay them off to cut costs.
At the end of the last edition of the day, we would get a copy of the front page as it was moving on the printing press and out into the world. And [the page designer] brought me back a fake headline. We were covering an election and he brought me back a fake headline that had the wrong winner on it. And I sort of went ballistic, for me. I was very upset because you know, from time to time, newspapers become notorious for articles that people wrote in jest, and they end up on the street. That was the way it was back when everything was on paper. And I didn’t want that to happen. So I made him go all the way down and bring me back a copy of the final edition as it was coming off the press as proof that the correct headline was going up.
— Tony Kessler, mild-mannered former Banner managing editor, on newsroom pranks
Another New Start
By 2016, local newspapers were in a precipitous decline. The Tennessean’s circulation numbers were plummeting. The pivot to video that Facebook — at the time the way most people found important local news stories — insisted was necessary ended up being a disaster. People who wanted to keep up on local news throughout the day didn’t want to unintentionally flood their offices with noise every time a story breaks. And reader attitudes were changing. Charges of media bias were morphing into accusations of fake news and readers became convinced that newspapers weren’t just shaped by the editorial concerns of the people in charge, but were outright fabricating things.
So, you have a situation where local media is shifting to a form of story delivery most people don’t want, causing advertisers to panic, while at the same time they’re also losing credibility with readers, fairly or unfairly as the case may be.
During this time, journalism veterans Steve Cavendish and Demetria Kalodimos got to talking about what a modern local news operation might look like. Cavendish had worked for newspapers across the country, including the Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post. He edited both The City Paper and the Nashville Scene. Kalodimos is a beloved television news personality, having anchored and reported news at WSMV, before devoting her time to producing documentaries. Between the two of them, they have nearly 60 years’ worth of experience gathering and reporting the news. Cavendish knows how to run a newsroom and Kalodimos brings to the table extensive experience writing and making video news stories people want to watch.
They thought that a digital outlet that updated regularly, that was funded by readers, not by advertisers, and that didn’t waste space or effort on having an editorial page or an official editorial stance. As the idea became more real and the business model more plausible, they decided they needed a name that would say to Nashville, “Here are the well-reported stories you need to know.”
The Banner name was just sitting there, ready to be called back into service as a trusted news source in Nashville. While it’s simplistic to say that a paper that hired the first Black reporter at a white outlet and that once was named the Republican Banner was the “conservative” outlet while its rival, with whom it often stole reporters and editors back and forth with, was the “good” “liberal” paper, it is true that this is the conventional wisdom about the Banner, so I asked Cavendish to address this head-on.
“It is true that some people associate the Banner as being conservative,” Cavendish said. “In the final decades, it was defined as much by competition for scoops with The Tennessean as anything.” Not that he’s trying to hide any of the warts attached to the Banner name: “I think the history of every newspaper has a lot of unsavory elements.”
I asked Cavendish directly what’s worth preserving in the Banner legacy and he started by listing off some of the great bylines: Robert Churchwell, Frances Meeker and Mary Hance; Fred Russell and Edgar Allen; Bill Hance and Tam Gordon. To that, he added, “Getting the scoop on Elvis dying and Charlie Appleton working the phones with local sheriffs between editions to break news.”
How is Cavendish able to rattle off all these names? He, like many current and former journalists in town, worked for the Banner in the last years of its last incarnation. He, and others, are as much the legacy of the Banner as the racist whims of an eccentric old railroad family or the epic political poetry of some ancient editors.
By his own admission, Cavendish is not much of a poet, has never engaged in a gun duel with a fellow editor nor fistfought a lawyer. (“I thought about it after being deposed once in a public records case,” he told me, speaking of the last.) Nor is he sufficiently eccentric to ever have owned a desktop cannon.
Also unlike previous incarnations of the Banner, this one did not arrive fully formed or staffed. For months, it was a two-person operation. Then slowly, new Banner stories started to appear in the Nashville Scene, a print partner for the fledgling operation. Kalodimos’s video pieces began to air on NewsChannel 5, their TV partner. Then the Banner website got more than one page. The Banner masthead returned, with an update: The angry eagle, redrawn by a Bristol illustrator best known for etching figures for Burt’s Bees, now looks down and left instead of right and up. The lettering is less “a Transylvanian count would like to invite you to his wedding” and more “Helvetica got some elf ears,” but it is still fancy.
Perhaps the most significant way this new version of the Banner is different from those of yore is a business model that would be unrecognizable to the likes of Felix K. Zollicoffer, H.M. Doak and your choice of Stahlmans. It will be all digital and funded directly by readers, just as Cavendish and Kalodimos had discussed in the early years. No paywall. No blinking ads, pop-ups or auto-play videos. And no op-eds, which reinforces another departure from the Banners of old — especially the racist agitations of the 1950s and 60s.
Even with the combined experience of Cavendish and Kalodimos, a newsroom quickly filling with experienced journalists and a two-hundred-year-long history, the new Banner is still a new venture and the viability of the business model depends on the Banner being able to attract enough readers who find it valuable. I asked Cavendish what he hopes will be the new legacy of the paper.
“The spirit of being the underdog paper and having to work twice as hard to win.”