NASHVILLE, TN — For decades, the news media has played an important role in our city, state, nation and world. At its best, the media helps us keep track of the comings and goings of our society, form births to deaths and all points in between. In the process, the media manages to keep some of us informed about some of the things some of the time while annoying and agonizing, en- lightening and entertaining us.
As our nation has grown and changed, that constant turn of our history’s pages has shown us time and time again no one media organization can effectively and adequately cover our history as it is being made. It takes a variety of news groups, a diverse team of thinkers, reporters, writers, photographers and cartoonists. That’s where the Tennessee Tribune comes in. As our city sees a steady shrinking of the ability and desire of Nashville’s main street media outlets to cover the city they ostensibly serve, weekly papers like the Tennessee Tribune are increasingly helping fill a widening gap of reporting on developments in our increasingly diverse community.
For sure, The Tennessee Tribune is not trying to fill the news and information gaps left by the closure of The Nashville Banner and downsizing of The (Nashville) Tennessean. It, nor any of the state’s weeklies, matches the impressive histories of those journalism legends in reporting on top political, religious, education, health and crime stories.
Still, with the small staff and meager resources it has, the Tribune helps fill that hunger we have to know what’s going on around us. It keeps the community informed about business and religious community developments, keeps diverse voices in its opinion columns offering strong and articulate viewpoints on topics of import to the community, some that were not heard in the last days of the Banner and The Tennessean.
Week after week, readers of the Tribune see and read stories that round out our community’s need to be informed about the `what’ in our community and
the ‘who’ behind those developments. It has been an honor to play a small role in reporting stories for the Tribune and continuing to help our community
stand strong as the Athens of the South.
