The Commercial Appeal

The Commercial Appeal (also known as the Memphis Commercial Appeal) is a daily newspaper of Memphis, Tennessee, and its surrounding metropolitan area. It is owned by the Gannett Company; its former owner, the E. W. Scripps Company, also owned the former afternoon paper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar, which it folded in 1983. The 2016 purchase by Gannett of Journal Media Group (Scripps' direct successor) effectively gave it control of the two major papers in western and central Tennessee, uniting the Commercial Appeal with Nashville's The Tennessean.

The Commercial Appeal
The April 8, 2016 front page of
The Commercial Appeal
TypeDaily newspaper
FormatBroadsheet
Owner(s)Gannett
PublisherMike Jung[1]
EditorMark Russell[2]
Founded1841 (as The Appeal)
Headquarters495 Union Avenue
Memphis, Tennessee 38103
United States
Circulation94,775 Daily
133,788 Sunday
(March 2013)[3]
ISSN0745-4856
OCLC number9227552
Websitecommercialappeal.com

The Commercial Appeal is a seven-day morning paper. It is distributed primarily in Greater Memphis, including Shelby, Fayette, and Tipton counties in Tennessee; DeSoto, Tate, and Tunica counties in Mississippi; and in Crittenden County in Arkansas. These are the contiguous counties to the city of Memphis.

In 1994, The Commercial Appeal won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning by Michael Ramirez.[4]

History

The paper's name comes from a 19th-century merger between two predecessors, the Memphis Commercial and the Appeal.

The Appeal

The Commercial Appeal traces its heritage to the 1839 publication, The Western World & Memphis Banner of the Constitution. Bought by Col. Henry Van Pelt in 1840, it was renamed The Memphis Appeal. During the American Civil War the Appeal was one of the major newspapers serving the Southern cause. On June 6, 1862, the presses and plates were loaded into a boxcar and published from Grenada, Mississippi. The Appeal later journeyed on to Jackson, Mississippi, Meridian, Mississippi, Atlanta, Georgia, Montgomery, Alabama and finally Columbus, Georgia, where the plates were destroyed on April 16, 1865, temporarily halting publication days before the Confederate surrender. The press was hidden and saved, and publication resumed in Memphis, using it, on November 5, 1865.[5]

Mergers and facilities changes

Another early paper, The Avalanche, was incorporated in 1894, publishing as The Appeal-Avalanche until an 1894 merger created The Commercial Appeal. The name is properly The Commercial Appeal and not the Memphis Commercial Appeal as it is often called, although the predecessor Appeal was formally the Memphis Daily Appeal.[5]

In 1932 the newspaper moved into a disused Ford Motor Company assembly plant at 495 Union Avenue where it stayed until 1977, when a new building was completed adjacent.[5]

In 1936 The Commercial Appeal was purchased by the Scripps Howard newspaper chain.,[5] and later by the Gannett Company. In 2017, Gannett closed the Commercial Appeal's Memphis printing plant, laying off 19 full-time employees, and consolidated printing with its newspaper in Jackson, Tennessee.[6]

Sale of real estate assets

In April 2018 The Commercial Appeal sold its longtime offices and plant at 495 Union Ave. in Memphis for $3.8 million, indicating plans to move to another Memphis site. At the time of sale, the property, comprised a 125,000-square-foot office building, a 150,000-square-foot printing and production plant, and adjacent real estate. A New York-based real estate company, Twenty Lake Holdings LLC, bought the 6.5 acres with the five-story office building and attached printing/production building.[7] Twenty Lake Holdings is a division of a hedge fund which has been accused of a "mercenary strategy" of buying newspapers, slashing jobs, and selling the buildings and other assets.[8]

Content

Columnists

The paper in the 1940s had a well known columnist Paul Flowers who wrote "The Greenhouse" column.[9]

Lydel Sims was a columnist for the Commercial Appeal from 1949 until his death in 1995.

Civil rights

The Commercial Appeal has had a mixed record on civil rights. Despite its Confederate background the paper won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for its coverage and editorial opposition to the resurgent Ku Klux Klan.

From 1916 to 1968, the paper published a cartoon called Hambone's Meditations. The cartoon featured a black man, Hambone, that many African Americans came to regard as a racist caricature.[10]

In 1917, the paper published the scheduled time and place for the upcoming Lynching of Ell Persons.[11]

During the Civil Rights Movement, the paper generally avoided coverage.[12] It did take a stance against pro-segregation rioters during the Ole Miss riot of 1962. However, its owner, Scripps-Howard, exerted a generally conservative and anti-union influence.[10]

The paper opposed the Memphis sanitation strike, portraying both labor organizers and Martin L. King, Jr. as outside meddlers.[10][12]

During the late 1960s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) leaked "information of a derogatory nature regarding the Invaders and other black nationalist militants," some of which may have been fabricated by the FBI itself, to a Commercial Appeal reporter who then used that information to write articles critical of the Invaders. This manipulation of The Commercial Appeal was part of the FBI's counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) against black nationalists in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[13]

Monetization controversy
Ad copy agents take orders for advertisements in the Old Commercial Appeal Building, 495 Union Avenue, Memphis, in 1961.

In the fall of 2007, the Appeal touched off a controversial policy that would have linked specific stories and specific advertisers. The proposal was greeted by outrage among media analysts, so the authors of the so-called "monetization memo"—the Appeal's editor and its sales manager—quietly withdrew the effort.[14]

Guns database

At the end of 2008, The Commercial Appeal posted a controversial database listing Tennessee residents with permits to carry handguns.[15] The database is a public record in Tennessee but had not been posted online. After a permit-to-carry holder shot and killed a man in Memphis for parking too close to his SUV and vandalizing it, the gun database suddenly came to the attention of pro-gun groups, including the NRA and the Tennessee Firearms Association. Legislators who supported gun groups quickly drafted a bill to close the permit-to-carry database. The Tennessee Coalition for Open Government lobbied to keep the database public and the bill to close the database did not pass in the 2009 legislative session.

In a February 15, 2009 editorial, the newspaper defended publication of the handgun permit list and suggested it could protect permit holders by steering criminals away from armed households.[16] An independent study released in 2011 found "[Memphis] ZIP Codes with the highest concentration of permits experienced roughly 1.7 fewer burglaries per week/per ZIP Code in the 15 weeks following the publicization of the database, and those with the lowest concentration experienced on average 1.5 more burglaries."[17]

The Commercial Appeal website for the database currently notes that on April 25, 2013, a law was signed that classified information contained in handgun carry permit applications as "confidential" available only to the court or to law enforcement. The State Attorney General did not restrict publication of existing copies of the database; the Commercial Appeal has indicated that it will maintain its April 19, 2013 updated database "until the newspaper determines the information is too outdated and no longer serves the public's interests."[15]

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See also

References
  1. "Mike Jung named new president of The Commercial Appeal". Commercialappeal.com. Retrieved July 29, 2018.
  2. "Mark Russell named executive editor of The Commercial Appeal". Commercialappeal.com. Retrieved July 29, 2018.
  3. "Total Circ for US Newspapers". Alliance for Audited Media. March 31, 2013. Archived from the original on March 6, 2013. Retrieved June 30, 2013.
  4. Pérez-peña, Richard (April 7, 2008). "Washington Post Wins 6 Pulitzer Prizes". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved August 16, 2017.
  5. State of Tennessee Historical Marker, The Commercial Appeal / Publishing Locations. The Historical Marker Database.
  6. The Commercial Appeal to be printed in Jackson, Tenn. The Commercial Appeal, Feb. 13, 2017.
  7. Bailey, Tom. "The Commercial Appeal sells 495 Union for $2.8M, plans to move to more modern site". USA Today Network, April 20, 2018.
  8. O'Connell, Jonathan and Brown, Emma. "A hedge fund's 'mercenary' strategy: Buy newspapers, slash jobs, sell the buildings". The Washington Post, February 11, 2019.
  9. 1981 reprinted M. Thomas Inge – Conversations with William Faulkner, 1999, p.92, "M.B. Mayfield .. After complimenting him he told me hesitantly that some of his poems had been published in The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, in Paul Flowers' "Greenhouse" column. When I read these poems I noticed that he had attached a nom de plume to his contributions. He explained that he was afraid the editor wouldn't publish them if he knew that he was black. Faulkner indicated that he knew Paul Flowers and that "
  10. Honey, Michael K. (2007). "Hambone's Meditations: The Failure of Community". Going down Jericho Road the Memphis strike, Martin Luther King's last campaign (1 ed.). New York: Norton. p. 129. ISBN 978-0-393-04339-6. Despite many black protests about it, the Commercial Appeal published Hambone's Meditations throughout the rising tide of civil rights and Black Power movements. Mass-media racism symbolized, Hooks said, that most whites were either blind or hostile to the plight of blacks and that a failure of communication and community existed in Memphis. Yet white editors thought they were at the forefront of change.
  11. Goings, K. W.; Smith, G. L. (March 1, 1995). "'Unhidden' Transcripts: Memphis and African American Agency, 1862–1920". Journal of Urban History. 21 (3): 372–394. doi:10.1177/009614429502100304.
  12. Atkins, Joseph B. (2008). "Labor, civil rights, and Memphis". Covering for the bosses : labor and the Southern press. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 9781934110805. Like Memphis itself, the editors at the Commercial Appeal and Press-Scimitar felt they had kept their heads largely above the fray during the civil rights battles across the South in the early to mid-1960s, particularly in comparison to the blatantly racist and rabble-rousing histrionics in the two majors newspapers of Mississippi, the Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News. [...] Yet the sanitation strike of 1968 and Martin L. King, Jr.'s involvement proved to many black Memphians that the newspapers weren't that different from their sister papers in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South. Blacks picked both newspapers within a week after the end of the sanitation strike to protest the coverage.
  13. "Memphis Commercial Appeal Assisted FBI's COINTELPRO Against Black Nationalists". Blog.seattlepi.com. November 18, 2010. Retrieved July 29, 2018.
  14. Barnes, Lindsay (November 8, 2007). "News for sale? Former C-Ville publisher sparks media debate". The Hook. Charlottesville. Retrieved February 27, 2008.
  15. "Tennessee Handgun Carry Permit Database". The Commercial Appeal. Memphis. November 8, 2008. Retrieved June 29, 2009.
  16. Chris Peck, "Inside the Newsroom: Case for gun-permit listings trumps emotional opposition," The Commercial Appeal, February 15, 2009.
  17. Alessandro Acquisti; Catherine Tucker (January 2, 2011). ""Guns, Privacy, and Crime"" (PDF). Heinz.cmu.edu. Retrieved July 29, 2018.
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