 The April 8, 2016 front page of The Commercial Appeal | |
| Type | Daily newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Broadsheet |
| Owner(s) | Gannett |
| Publisher | Mike Jung[1] |
| Editor | Mark Russell[2] |
| Founded | 1841 (asThe Appeal) |
| Headquarters | 495 Union Avenue Memphis, Tennessee, 38103 United States |
| Circulation | 94,775 Daily 133,788 Sunday (March 2013)[3] |
| ISSN | 0745-4856 |
| OCLC number | 9227552 |
| Website | commercialappeal |
The Commercial Appeal (also known as theMemphis Commercial Appeal) is a daily newspaper ofMemphis, Tennessee, and its surroundingmetropolitan area. It is owned by theGannett Company; its former owner, theE. W. Scripps Company, also owned the former afternoon paper, theMemphis Press-Scimitar, which it folded in 1983. The 2016 purchase by Gannett ofJournal Media Group (Scripps' direct successor) effectively gave it control of the two major papers in western and central Tennessee, uniting theCommercial Appeal withNashville'sThe Tennessean.
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 ofMemphis.
The Commercial Appeal won the 1923Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its opposition of the Ku Klux Klan's operations in the region. In 1994, the newspaper won aPulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning byMichael Ramirez.[4]
The paper's name comes from a 19th-century merger between two predecessors, theMemphis Commercial and theAppeal.
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 renamedThe Memphis Appeal. During theAmerican Civil War theAppeal was one of the major newspapers serving theSouthern cause, and its editorBenjamin Dill was one of the most wanted confederates of the war. On June 6, 1862, the presses and plates were loaded into aboxcar and published fromGrenada, Mississippi. TheAppeal later journeyed on toJackson, Mississippi,Meridian, Mississippi,Atlanta, Georgia,Montgomery, Alabama and finallyColumbus, Georgia, where the plates were destroyed on April 16, 1865, temporarily halting publication days before theConfederate surrender. The press was hidden and saved, and publication resumed in Memphis, using it, on November 5, 1865.[5]
Another early paper,The Avalanche, was incorporated in 1894, publishing asThe Appeal-Avalanche until an 1894 merger createdThe Commercial Appeal. The name is properlyThe Commercial Appeal and not theMemphis Commercial Appeal as it is often called, although the predecessorAppeal was formally theMemphis Daily Appeal.[5] From the late 19th century through the first quarter of the 20th century,The Commercial Appeal was led by editorC. P. J. Mooney, "tireless, combative and a devoutly Catholic teetotaler".[6]
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 theScripps Howard newspaper chain,.[5] Its sister afternoon paper, thePress-Scimitar, was discontinued in 1983.
The Commercial Appeal was folded into theJournal Media Group by successorE. W. Scripps Company in 2015 after Scripps purchasedMilwaukee's Journal Communications and chose to spin off its newspaper assets to expand its broadcasting operations. Gannett then purchased Journal Media Group several months later, taking control of theCommercial Appeal in April 2016. Gannett then closed theCommercial Appeal's Memphis printing plant after taking control, laying off 19 full-time employees, with the paper then printed at Gannett's existing newspaper in nearbyJackson, theSun.[7] The company's west Tennessee printing operations then were consolidated out-of-state in February 2021, when the plant forJackson, Mississippi'sThe Clarion-Ledger began to print theCommercial Appeal andSun.[8]
In April 2018,The Commercial Appeal sold its longtime offices and plant at 495 Union Avenue 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.[9] Twenty Lake Holdings is a division of a hedge fund that has been accused of a "mercenary strategy" of buying newspapers, slashing jobs, and selling the buildings and other assets.[10]
The paper in the 1940s had a well known columnist named Paul Flowers who wrote "The Greenhouse" column.[11]
Lydel Sims was a columnist for theCommercial Appeal from 1949 until his death in 1995.
The Commercial Appeal has had a mixed record oncivil rights. In 1868, it published an article by former confederate generalAlbert Pike that was critical of the methods of the Ku Klux Klan, but lauded their aims ofwhite supremacy.[12] In 1917, the paper published the scheduled time and place for the upcomingLynching of Ell Persons.[13]
Despite itsConfederate background the paper won aPulitzer Prize in 1923 for its coverage and editorial opposition to the resurgentKu Klux Klan.
From 1916 to 1968, the paper published a cartoon calledHambone's Meditations. The cartoon featured a black man, Hambone, that many African Americans came to regard as a racistcaricature.[14]
During theCivil Rights Movement, the paper generally avoided coverage of the topic.[15] It did take a stance against pro-segregation rioters during theOle Miss riot of 1962. However, its owner,Scripps-Howard, exerted a generally conservative and anti-union influence.[14]
The paper opposed theMemphis sanitation strike, portraying both labor organizers andMartin Luther King Jr. as outside meddlers.[14][15]
During the late 1960s, theFederal 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 aCommercial Appeal reporter who then used that information to write articles critical of the Invaders. This manipulation ofThe Commercial Appeal was part of the FBI's counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) against black nationalists in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[16]
In the fall of 2007, theAppeal attempted to launch anative advertising effort that would have linked specific stories to specific advertisers who paid for what would be considered anadvertorial. The proposal was greeted by outrage among media analysts, so the authors of the so-called "monetization memo"—theAppeal's editor and its sales manager—quietly withdrew the effort.[17]
At the end of 2008,The Commercial Appeal posted a controversial database listing Tennessee residents with permits to carry handguns.[18] The database is a public record inTennessee 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 theNRA 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.[19] 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."[20]
TheCommercial 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; theCommercial 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."[18]
Despite many black protests about it, theCommercial Appeal published Hambone's Meditations throughout the rising tide of civil rights andBlack 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.
Like Memphis itself, the editors at theCommercial Appeal andPress-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, theClarion-Ledger and theJackson Daily News. [...] Yet the sanitation strike of 1968 andMartin Luther King'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.
Pulitzer Prize for Public Service (1918–1925) | ||
|---|---|---|
| .png) | |
