Nashville City Paper, sister publication of CL, shuts down after 13 years
‘I cannot say enough about the job this staff has done in covering Nashville’
The Nashville City Paper, a sister publication of Creative Loafing Atlanta, will shut down on Aug. 9 after nearly 13 years of covering the vibrant city.
Chris Ferrell, the CEO of SouthComm, the Nashville-based owner of the City Paper, CL, and more than 10 other titles, cited dwindling advertising dollars and the difficulty of publishing multiple news publications in a single market in a meeting with staff this morning, according to a story about the closing. The City Paper was one of several newspapers published by SouthComm in Nashville.
“In the last few days, we made the difficult decision to stop publishing The City Paper,” a City Paper article quotes him as saying. “After years of being subsidized by our investors and other Southcomm publications, we finally determined that there was not enough advertiser support for the free newsweekly model we were trying to sustain. The model proved very popular with readers, but in publishing the revenue doesn’t necessarily follow the readership.”
A portion of the staff will lose their jobs. Others will take positions at other SouthComm publications in Nashville, the article says. Those include the Nashville Scene, the award-winning altweekly, and Nashville Post. Both those publications will reportedly expand their news coverage to “fill the gap” left by closing the City Paper.
“I cannot say enough about the job this staff has done in covering Nashville,” City Paper Steve Cavendish told the paper, which was founded in 2000 as a Monday through Friday publication but shifted to weekly distribution after 2008. “We punched above our weight, told a lot of interesting stories, and held officials and institutions accountable. This city is a better place when you have more professional journalists covering it and I’m sorry we won’t continue as a publication.”
The decision to close the City Paper is not expected to affect CL’s operations. In a meeting with staffers about the closure, CL Publisher Sharry Smith told staffers that the publication is “healthy” and outlined the various initiatives in the works to tap new revenue sources.