By Gordon McGonigall

To all those who say that newspapers are dying, that sound you hear—NacNak—may be the sound of Wayne Huff and Cheryl Puryear laughing.

"Community newspapers are alive and well," says Huff, whose own publication, Athens Now, is thriving in his adopted home town of Athens, Alabama, and whose media company, NacNak, is partnering with Puryear to produce this Middle Tennessee edition, which debuted January 15. Puryear, as publisher of the Nashville edition, will seek to build relationships with existing local papers and help new publishers gain a foothold in their communities in and around Nashville.

"We want to connect communities all over Tennessee and into northern Alabama," says Puryear, who has had a twenty-year career in newspaper marketing and sales. "Our strengths will be focusing on informational and inspirational stories, and on classifieds. People can post their ads for free at our website, and we’ll print them for free as well."

Puryear acknowledges the importance of a strong Internet component, and she points to the new Nashville site (www.nashville.nacnak.com) as a powerful tool in this particular multimedia enterprise. Besides classifieds, the site offers local news, videos, calendar of events, coupons, a restaurant guide, free auctions, and job postings.

"We’ve got some exciting online strategies that our print product will back up," she says. "As for the newspaper, we feel that it offers a very strong value that is tangible and traditional."

Puryear should know. Having lived in Sumner County for twenty-seven years, Puryear went to work in sales in 1989 for Multimedia, which owned the Hendersonville Star News and the Gallatin News Examiner. She worked her way up to advertising director, before taking a sabbatical in 1995, after the birth of her twins, to work as an independent marketing consultant. For six years she assisted individual and corporate clients in marketing and promotions, while working with the local tourism department and with community event organization. In 2001 she went back to Sumner County Publications but a new employer, Gannett, which had purchased Multimedia in 1995. When Wayne Huff called her recently about his plans for Middle Tennessee, she was intrigued.

"He’s got some great ideas," she says. "We’ve got some exciting things in the works."

First and foremost among those will be working with local community newspapers, many of whom may be hanging on but struggling like large papers are. Survival may involve reinventing a business model but not necessarily reinventing the wheel.

"The strength of local papers is that they’re able to dig into their communities," Huff says. "We think newspapers ought to be as essential to a community as the library and the schools. What we’ll be able to offer them is a greater reach for their advertisers, with not much additional cost. We’ll also be able to help them build readership, by providing classified ads from all over." Huff and Puryear envision offering an insert to established local publications while introducing complete new editions into communities without a strong existing newspaper.

"Wherever we go," Puryear says, "we want to provide information and inspiration, positive stories and fun stuff to read. We’d like to build habits—make the newspaper required reading again."