A New Voice

Yesterday I caught up with my friend Holly McCall, whom I have known through several lives. Her latest is a new online newspaper, called the Tennessee Lookout.

The Lookout is the latest twist on an old trade in Tennessee – the trade being journalism, the twist being presentation on the internet only. It is not the first news outlet to live exclusively online and with a non-for-profit business model – the Daily Memphian was that – but the Lookout is the newest. It began “publication” just this week, with a standard mix of news and opinion.

The staff is small but superb. Anita Wadhwani and Nate Rau established their chops at The Tennessean, where they were award-winning reporters. A third Lookout staffer is Dulce Torres, whose by-line has appeared in the Nashville Scene (and at MTSU she was named the John Seigenthaler Outstanding Graduate in Print Journalism). McCall is the editor-in-chief.

Backing this Nashville venture is the States Newsroom organization, based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (The Lookout is their 16th property.) On its website, States Newsroom identifies itself as “a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit.”

McCall’s most recent online venture in Nashville was one she co-founded with Justin Kanew, called the Tennessee Holler. The Holler is straight-up partisan Democrat in its running commentary on Tennessee’s ruling GOP supermajority. (McCall and Kanew parted company in December.) Most recently, McCall was one of Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign organizers in Tennessee.

In the States Newsroom universe, editors are a variation of “progressive” – call them left-leaning – but McCall promises news coverage that will be balanced. She promises a new voice and fresh coverage of Tennessee’s state and local governments and their policy choices.

“We’re going to cover a lot of state news that doesn’t get covered the way it should be, and we’ll share with local papers,” she told me. “The States News model is more what I had in mind. I really wanted to get into policy. I wanted to educate people to what’s going on and how it affects them. I am a Democrat but I don’t think that will change anybody’s mind.”

There will be no ads and no paywalls on the Lookout site. Its revenues comes from States News. McCall says she does not know who their donors are. She said she’s confident there’s no influence or pressure on coverage from the parent organization or donors.

My own take is that there’s room in Tennessee for more news coverage, especially at our state capitol, and for good analysis of policy choices.

The Lookout is welcome – to show us what they can do.