NashvillePost.com

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NashvillePost.com is an online news service covering business and politics in the Nashville, Tennessee metropolitan area. It is locally owned and available by subscription.

NashvillePost.com competes with other daily news media in the Middle Tennessee area by trying to offer a higher standard of business and political coverage than is found in Gannett-owned daily newspaper The Tennessean, the weekly Nashville Business Journal (owned by the American City Business Journals chain) and other media outlets operated by out-of-town corporations, as well as independent local daily The City Paper. Its journalists seek to break major news stories involving local business and politics ahead of those competitors.

Bill Carey and David A. Fox conceived NashvillePost.com in 1999 and began publishing early in 2000. Both were former business reporters for The Tennessean. They secured venture capital funding from Solidus Co., a local company whose other investments include The Documentary Channel, small-town newspaper owner American Hometown Publishing Inc., stock market analysis firm New Constructs LLC and publicly held restaurant chain J. Alexander's Inc. Carey left NashvillePost.com at the end of 2000.

In 2001, NashvillePost.com acquired the monthly magazine Business Nashville, which was renamed as Nashville Post magazine and later reconceived, with a statewide focus, as Business Tennessee. In 2005, NashvillePost.com ceased publishing online as Fox departed to work with a hedge fund and run for a position on Nashville's school board, to which he was elected in August 2006. After three months, however, Solidus decided to revive the online service under a new operating team consisting of former Tennessean business journalist Richard Lawson, former political operative Ken Whitehouse, journalist/author E. Thomas Wood and the first full-time publisher at NashvillePost.com, Todd Staff.

In 2006, the new team rolled out a revamped website while breaking numerous business and political stories that attracted local attention. NashvillePost.com entered an alliance with television station WKRN-News2 in Nashville, where Lawson began making regular appearances to discuss business news. The news service brought a lawsuit against the Tennessee Lottery over its refusal to release records related to the firing of a senior executive following allegations of sexual harassment, and in May 2006, a Nashville judge ordered the state-sponsored lottery to turn over the documents.

Between May and August 2006, monthly pageviews at NashvillePost.com rose from about 75,000 to more than 111,000, a gain of 48 percent, according to statistics published by the news service.

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