Commentary by Chris Smith, editor-in-chief of Clarksville Now, as part of the essay series “The Road to 250: Community Spirit in Action,” celebrating the history of unity in Clarksville ahead of America’s 250th anniversary.

The history of journalism in Clarksville is marked by both competition to see who would be the voice of our community and collaboration to ensure the best interests of that community come first, particularly in times of disaster.

It began with the Clarksville Chronicle, which was founded in 1808, just a couple of decades after the city’s 1784 founding. For the next 60 years, the Chronicle remained Clarksville’s primary source of both local and national news.

Enter The Tobacco Leaf

In 1869, The Tobacco Leaf was founded to advocate for the tobacco farming industry, much to the annoyance of the Chronicle, which responded, “Our paper can advocate for the tobacco interests as well as if it were named the Tobacco Hogshead!”

The Chronicle vs. Tobacco Leaf rivalry was set aside during the Great Fire of 1878 when the Leaf offices were destroyed and the Chronicle stepped in to save them. “Their press work will be done for the present in this office,” the Chronicle reported on April 20. “We tender them our warmest sympathy and our aid in every way which may be found practicable.” That spirit of cooperation continued in the aftermath of the fire, which appeared to have started with protests over the deadly shooting of a Black man by a Clarksville Police officer. The Tobacco Leaf was initially vocal in its demand for justice for the arsonists. But a meeting of community leaders seemed to result in a call for calm and order. That meant no findings of blame on either side, and it meant an apparent agreement of silence from both newspapers. It would be over 100 years before a local historian would work to end that silence and examine what happened.

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In 1890, the competition came to an end when the owners of the Tobacco Leaf bought the Chronicle, naming the merged paper “The Clarksville Daily Tobacco Leaf-Chronicle,” mercifully shortened to “The Leaf-Chronicle” some years later.

Into corporate hands

The combined newspaper remained in family ownership until it was purchased in 1973 by the Multimedia company. Under Multimedia, the press at The Leaf-Chronicle published most of the nearby small, weekly newspapers, including The Dickson Herald, Gallatin News Examiner, Stewart-Houston Times, Ashland City Times, Robertson County Times and others. In 1995, Multimedia merged with Gannett, connecting the Leaf and the regional weeklies to The Tennessean in Nashville. All of this created important relationships among the editors, and over the years they collaborated on a variety of business, staffing and journalism projects.

Early on the morning of Jan. 22, 1999, a tornado ripped through downtown, taking out the top floor of the Leaf-Chronicle building and temporarily disabling the printing press. Once again, a spirit of cooperation prevailed, and the Leaf was printed starting that very day in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, by the New Era until the press could be restarted four days later.

Clarksville Now emerges

The launch party for Clarksville Now at the Water Street Event Center in April 2010. (Lee Erwin)

In April 2010, Katie Gambill, general manager of the radio group 5 Star Media, launched a website called Clarksville Now. It was initially focused on community information, which had begun diminishing at the newspaper. But one month later in May, Clarksville suffered one of its worst floods on record, and Clarksville Now discovered that in a time when people were desperate for immediate news, they could provide that, too. The mission expanded, and Clarksville Now began to compete with the Leaf, adding some coverage of local government and sports. I had been working at the Leaf since 1999, and I was both annoyed and energized by the competition for breaking news.

As the shift to digital media began pushing print aside at a nationwide level, the Leaf was forced to downsize, with the off-siting of the press in 2008, and also finance, HR, classified ads and copyediting. By 2017, the Leaf no longer had a local publisher, and I was moved into a regional role, supervising Gannett’s small Tennessee dailies and weeklies, while also serving as Leaf-Chronicle editor with a few remaining reporters. In March 2020, when the COVID pandemic hit, the Leaf closed its offices to the public, never to reopen, while operations continued by remote.

A few months later, I got a call from Katie, offering me an opportunity with Clarksville Now. The operations had competed for years, but it was a friendly competition, similar to the one between the Chronicle and the Tobacco Leaf over 100 years earlier. Katie and I knew each other through Leadership Clarksville, an excellent resource for building such connections. So, in July 2020, I shifted careers, becoming editor of this free news website that was growing in readership and size. We added government coverage and investigative journalism to the mix. Within a couple of years, Clarksville Now had replaced The Leaf as the primary local news source, and with by far the largest newsroom.

Digital-focused future

5 Star Media Group is owned by Saga Communications, and the experiment with Clarksville Now has proven so successful that Saga is rolling out similar news websites across the country, with 16 such sites launched by 2025, from Bellingham, Washington, to Ocala, Florida.

As communities across the country struggle to maintain local journalism – a critical component of our democracy – a model created here in Clarksville, born of both competition and collaboration, could be a key to its future.

Chris Smith was an editor at The Leaf-Chronicle from 1999 to 2020 and has been editor-in-chief of Clarksville Now since 2020.

Additional sources: “The Leaf-Chronicle: 200 Years of Service,” by George Zepp, 2008; and “Lynch Law and the Great Clarksville Fire of 1878: Social Order in a New South Town” by Richard Gildrie, 1983.

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