Part I: The Rise and the Fall of The Tennessean

When I was hired from the Observer-Dispatch newspaper in upstate New York to be a columnist for The Tennessean, it was seen by my colleagues as a step up to a major daily, Metro newspaper.

Except one.

Bobbi Bowman, now with an executive with the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and formerly Corporate Gannett (owner of The Tennessean), took me aside. She was managing editor of the Observer-Dispatch after former gigs at The Washington Post and other big newspapers.

And she shocked me by telling me I might want to rethink my decisions about going from a 52,000 Sunday circulation newspaper to one with five times the readership.

She told me that things were not as rosy on the outside as they appeared at The Tennessean, most specifically with the man who was the top editor of the place in 1996.

I listened politely. I told her I had thought out the decision and liked from an outsider's view what I saw at The Tennessean during my interview. And so we parted as friends.

And over the next 10 years at The Tennessean, I learned how sound of advice my friend and colleague gave me, particularly with the person in charge.

I won't name the editor. He doesn't deserve his name used in my blog. I'll just say he was the person who followed John Seigenthaler and preceded E.J. Mitchell, both editors of distinction and real leaders who produced a solid, interesting product.

For this series, I'll call the editor TEASBBEJM, pronounced (TEA-A-SHA-BEE-GEM).

From talking with friends and colleagues on the Tennessean operating committee and the newsroom, it is agreed TEASBBEJM is the person who ruined The Tennessean, which once had 214 employees in its newsroom after the folding of the Nashville Banner. Now those numbers have fallen below 100 and will continue to decline in 2009. (One reader has written in to say the newsroom has more than 100 employees. But since it was an anonymous contribution, I did not post it. I can't post comments that state purported facts without identity and thus credibility. Gotta abide by journalism rules.)

But TEASBBEJM frittered away that advantage with a leadership of serving his faults firsts. His strengths disappeared. And so did The Tennessean's distinction as a leader and a quality product for both conservative and liberal readers.

TEASBBEJM and I constantly clashed, even publicly in the newsroom. He was a bully. But worse, he did not care about readers, nor was he interested in meeting and talking with them. He governed from an Ivory Tower and an office that had an automatic closing mechanism he could engage by simply hitting a button on his desk.

One of the funniest stories about that kind of mental deficiency was when famed exercise-iologist Richard Simmons came the newsroom. In vain, he knocked on TEASSBEJM's door to try and get him to come out and get a hug and encouragement to lose some of his substantial girth.

But the editor would not open his door. And neither would he open that door to readers or even some staff members who desperately wanted the newspaper to change for the better. To anyone who disagreed with him, he'd pull marketing survey results out of his mental holster like Matt Dillon did with a gun on Gunsmoke. Marketing surveys are the weakness of Gannett, done for every newspaper to tell editors what readers should want, not what they really need.

Gannett could have saved many millions of dollars by simply having its editors go out into their community and simply asking real people. They're not stupid. But editors believe they are. And now they are rightly harvesting a bitter fruit of declining circulation and ad sales. But the people being hurt at the newspapers are the rank and file, not the editors and publishers who continue to make the wrong decisions.

There certainly are exceptions to this generalization. Craig Moon was an outstanding publisher of The Tennessean. He allowed me to be a political writer when TEASSABEJM refused. Sadly for us, Moon left for greener and less frustrating pastures of Corporate and now USA Today, which still flourishes despite the downturn nationally for all newspapers.

Moon was treated with incredible disrespect by TEASBBEJM. I witnessed it first hand. And TEASBBEJM was able to get away with it and stymie change because of his buddies on the newsside at Corporate. Moon in turn was supported by the business side.

One would have thought such a setup would protect the journalistic side from abuse from the business side. But it was the exact opposite at The Tennessean. It was the executives on the business side on the operating committee who had spoken to readers and knew that change was needed in the product, desperately so. They were better journalists on the whole than those in the newsroom.

A former operating committee member told me the story of a golf tournament hosted for advertisers and other dignitaries by the newspaper. He was part of the group that included TEASBBEJM. The advertisers took him aside and asked him a question: "Why do they let the guy who writes the newspaper's wine column be the Editor?" The operating committee member had no answer.

In his series on The Tennessean, Scene writer Wily Stern tried to pin The Tennessean's problems on then managing editor Dave Green. He had Sonny Rawls, a former Tennessean writer and Pulitzer Prize winner in Philadelphia, call me and set up a get together lunch and interview. I agreed, even though Rawls had never contacted me once in years of my writing a column.

At O'Charley's in Brentwood, the guy tried to get me to answer that Green was the problem. Green had turned down Rawls' request to be sports editor at the newspaper. I refused. I put the blame on TEASBBJEM, which was the truth that Stern still missed in his series.

Finally, Rawls acknowledged that TEASBBJEM had been the newsroom tattle tell for Seigenthaler. And they all laughed at him.

But the bigger joke was that Seigenthaler choice him to be editor. No one is laughing now.

Now journalists I've spoke with acknowledge that TEASBBEJM was a good editor in the beginning. But he lost interest and tried to be a Seigenthaler by supporting anything and anyone who would make Nashville into a major league sports city while he lived out of the county in affluent Brentwood. That's why his lips were always puckered for then mayor and now Gov. Phil Bredesen's ass.

And so the newspaper suffered in quality and in serving the readers. You've seen the rest. TEASBBEJM's buddy is editor of the newspaper and another is the publisher. And they are driving the newspaper into the ground just as he did.

I feel really bad for my friends and colleagues who still remain at the newspaper. They are suffering greatly in trying to pursue their profession with excellence while paying bills at home. Yet they constantly work under the fear of losing their jobs.

My friend and colleague in New York tried to warn me. But I had to learn the hard way, as have the good readers of what now is a most unworthy publication that allowed TEASBBEJM to literally destroy its future.