New local news site launches in Nashville

ANTIOCH, Tenn. - Jan. 7, 2015 - PRLog -- A new digital news site has launched in Antioch, and its focus is intently local.

AntiochTenn.com (http://www.antiochtenn.com) is a local site dedicated to providing news and information exclusively about or impacting Antioch.

“Our mission is to simply paint a true picture of Antioch,” said founder Clay Morgan, a 20-plus-year veteran of newspapers and digital news sites. “If you look at other news outlets, you’d think all that happens in Antioch are huge real estate deals and murders. That’s just not the case.”

Morgan pointed out that Antioch is a culturally diverse community of about 80,000 people with a rich and vibrant locally-owned business community. It is a bustling area that needed its story told.

“To me Antioch was just begging for a local newspaper, and I decided to provide that, just in a digital format” Morgan, who lives in Antioch with his family, said.

The site will cover general news including government, public safety, and business. However, there will be a focus on youth, schools, and community. The key, Morgan said, is it must be about or impacting Antioch.

“Our mantra is simple,” Morgan said. “If it didn’t happen in Antioch or to someone from Antioch, it’s not news.”

Coverage thus far has included a mix of reporting, such as an Antioch-centril piece on the 2014 Education Report Card to a story on the recent influx of fitness centers in Antioch.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the site has also published photo galleries from the library’s “Cookies & Milk” Story Time, photos from Boy Scout outings, and winning stories from one school’s eighth-grade fiction writing contest.

“For years, I worked at community newspapers and a kid winning the spelling bee had as good a shot of making the front page as whatever the city council was up to,” Morgan said. “I want to recapture that community newspaper feel.”

Morgan said the idea began in 2011, about the time he and his wife were getting married.

“At the time, digital-only local and hyperlocal sites were just really getting started and struggling financially,” Morgan said. “I’ve always enjoyed the business side of news so I started thinking about revenue models and how I might assemble something.”

He said that in the last three or four years, business models have emerged demonstrating that local digital sites can achieve success in terms of news as well as financially.

Morgan’s wife lived in Antioch and when they got married he joined her in Antioch.

“I have learned how great this community is,” he said. “It has its challenges like any other large, diverse area, but Antioch is a great place and it occurred to me there was a narrative that was being overlooked by the metro media.”

Over time, Morgan said, the idea of business models and the idea of Antioch merged until he finally took the plunge, launching the site in December.

Morgan has worked in media for 30 years, since he was published in a national magazine at the age of 15. Morgan has spent the last 12 years as editor and publisher of weekly and daily newspapers, magazines and digital products including the DNJ Media Group in Murfreesboro, which published the Daily News Journal, four weekly papers, a monthly magazine, and a host of digital products. He has also edited and published newspapers in Kentucky, Mississippi, Texas, and in other Tennessee communities.