Tennessee's public square goes silent: Southcomm lays off state's most read political blogger

It was announced today that SouthComm (a media company that owns the City Paper, the Nashville Scene, and other outlets) has laid off seven employees including blogger Adam Kleinheider of Post Politics http://politics.nashvillepost.com/ .

You might ask what this development has to do with Tennessee's GLBT community. The answer is plenty. Kleinheider's blog aggregated everything political and that included equality issues. He brought the battles for equality at the local, state, and federal level to thousands of consumers of mainstream political news in Tennessee.

It was the one essential site where you could find political news and commentary that got you up to speed for the day. And as I said, that included political news affecting the GLBT community. Apart from Out & About Newspaper, Kleinheider's blog was probably the most important way that straight politicos in Tennessee learned about the advances and retreats on important issues like the adoption ban, employment discrimination, marriage equality, and Don't Ask, Don't Tell. With a few exceptions such as Wendi Thomas and Bianca Phillips, Tennessee's print journalism isn't covering those issues with much depth or frequency.

More generally, Post Politics was a place where conservatives and progressives met to argue and engage in dialogue. It gave Tennessee politics a new mirror of itself. I say "it." In reality, it was one man. Previously at a similar blog called Volunteer Voters hosted by WKRN, Adam showed us a gap in Tennessee's political discourse that we didn't even know existed before he created just the thing to fill it. We didn't know we needed a place online where we could see it all and discuss it all. We hope he'll find another venue soon.