The Commercial Appeal

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The Commercial Appeal
The July 27, 2005 front page of The Commercial Appeal
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet

Owner	E. W. Scripps Company
Publisher	Joseph Pepe
Editor	Chris Peck
Founded	1841 (as The Appeal)
Headquarters	495 Union Avenue Memphis, Tennessee 38103 United States
Circulation	150,652 Daily 194,090 Sunday^[1]

Website: www.commercialappeal.com

The Commercial Appeal is the predominant daily newspaper of Memphis, Tennessee and its surrounding metropolitan area. It is owned by The E. W. Scripps Company, a major North American media company. Scripps also owned the former afternoon paper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar, which it folded in 1983.

Like most market-dominant daily papers, the CA is a seven-day morning paper. It generally takes a liberal point of view regarding editorial positions. The Commercial Appeal is distributed over a wide area, in part because Memphis is the largest city for a considerable radius in any direction. The CA can be found in all of West Tennessee but also in the Jackson Purchase area of Kentucky, the Bootheel of Missouri, extreme northwestern Alabama and over most of eastern Arkansas and northern Mississippi.

The logo of The Commercial Appeal

The paper's unusual name comes from a 19th century merger between two predecessors, the Commercial and the Appeal. The Appeal had an interesting history during the American Civil War. On June 6, 1862, the presses and plates were loaded into a boxcar and moved to Grenada, Mississippi. The Appeal later journeyed to Jackson, Mississippi, Meridian, Mississippi, Atlanta, Georgia, and finally Montgomery, Alabama, where the plates were destroyed on April 6, 1865, only days before the Confederate surrender, halting publication temporarily of what had been one of the major papers serving the Southern cause. The press was hidden and saved, and publication resumed in Memphis, using it, on November 5, 1865. Another early paper, The Avalanche, was incorporated later in the 19th century. The paper is properly The Commercial Appeal and not the Memphis Commercial Appeal as it is often called, although the predecessor Appeal was formally the Memphis Daily Appeal.

The newspaper is also mentioned in the Spoon song Finer Feelings.

[edit] 'Monetizing' controversy

In the fall of 2007, the Appeal touched off a controversial policy that would have linked specific stories and specific advertisers. The proposal was greeted by outrage among media analysts, so the authors of the so-called 'monetization memo'-- the Appeal's editor and its sales manager-- quietly withdrew the effort.^[2]