4 strategies to startup success from the Nashville Banner

This is a series on Better News highlighting takeaways from an American Press Institute and News Revenue Hub collaboration aimed at supporting the development of revenue at both commercial and nonprofit local and community-based media.

These insights come from Steve Cavendish, president and editor of the Nashville Banner, who spoke at a live Q&A session in June 2025.

Steve Cavendish got his start at the Nashville Banner as a college intern in 1993, when it was a scrappy afternoon newspaper.

“I graduated on a Saturday and had a full-time job on Monday,” he said.

Gannett shut the Banner’s doors in 1998 and Cavendish went on to work at The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and several Nashville-area publications. Thirty years after his start as a Banner intern, Cavendish and longtime beloved local TV personality Demetria Kalodimos revived the Nashville Banner as a nonprofit digital civic news organization.

“The thing we care about most is local news,” Cavendish shared in a Q&A session hosted by the American Press Institute and News Revenue Hub. “The trademark and name was only out there because, and this is true of old afternoon newspapers, Gannett let it lapse. A board member picked it up and gave it to us.”

After the Banner was shut down, local news sources in Nashville continued to thin.

“That loss of bandwidth is what drew us to reviving the Banner and putting more resources back into local news,” Cavendish said. “We could have been the Nashville Sun or the Nashville Bugle but we would have spent nine months to a year educating the public that we were a news site. The Banner gave us immediate brand ID within the market.”

But it wasn’t done on a whim. Relaunching the Banner, which he said had been historically seen as “a paper with a backward-looking and often embarrassing editorial stance,” meant addressing its conservative past “warts and all.” For Cavendish, that meant publishing a 4,000-word piece by a local historian at launch detailing its origins in 1822 to its 2024 revival, as well as featuring voices of the Banner’s former employees on the first episode of its podcast Banner & Company.

Leveraging a legacy name and the past that came with it was a strategic move that accelerated audience trust and is built into the blueprint driving the Nashville Banner’s success.

Cavendish shared these four strategies for newsroom startups or anyone working to build revenue in support of local editorial initiatives:

Start with individual donors as the base of your model

Banner co-founders took five years from the initial planning in 2019 to officially launch in March 2024. After three years of fundraising, they hit a ceiling on their journey to raise an initial $2 million and had to turn to individuals.

“Many of the big foundations have things written into their bylaws that they won’t fund a nonprofit that has been in existence for less than three years,” Cavendish said. “We had to raise money from individual people. We had some six-figure chunks in there, but we did a lot of that 5,000 bucks at a time, 3,000 bucks at a time, 1,000.” In 2022, they started an email newsletter and produced longform stories monthly. Donors wanted more. The Banner hired a development director and a few interns to show what they could do over a summer proof of concept.

“The work after you begin, you don’t reach a starting point and then are done,” Cavendish said. “All that got you is the right to keep doing it.”

Jennifer Mizgata, founder and principal at Little Key, asked Steve Cavendish about The Nashville Banner’s approach to developing an individual donor base on the June 10 live AMA. This video recording has been edited for clarity.

Try a proof-of-concept approach focusing on one topic or time period

The Banner used the summer of 2023 as a proof of concept and focused solely on the August local elections. With more than 80 council candidates and nine mayoral candidates, the Banner took the opportunity to deeply cover the local races that were often overlooked by other outlets — and give them the same treatment they would for the presidential election. That meant showing up to every event, hosting events and publishing video interviews with every candidate.

“The thing that let us know we were on the right track — we put up a story that our intern had distilled down all candidate questionnaires into a 250-word bio for all candidates, their positions on the city, etcetera,” Cavendish said.

That single post became a voting guide to all at-large Metro Council races. They put up a site using NewsPack on July 1 and saw an immediate traffic spike. Elections were set for the first week of August, and when early voting began, they saw traffic on that post tick back up.

“Finally, on Election Day, it was the most read story on our site,” Cavendish said, noting that the guide rated higher than the live election results. “What it told us was this was actionable information. People were taking this into the voting booth with them.”

That three-to-four-month experiment not only showed news consumers and donors what the Banner could do, but it helped them raise the last $500,000 they needed to officially launch.

Relentlessly measure your success and share that data with prospective donors

Whether that’s content performance, audience growth, newsletter click-through rates or source diversity tracking, Cavendish said these data points help drive and inform editorial and business decisions. Their hyperfocus on local elections spurred readership and revenue. It also allowed them to show how they differ from other local outlets. Nearly 50% of their content is unique and not offered anywhere else — a metric they relentlessly track on every story if it meets the criteria and a consistent selling point that brings in more funding.

“The ability to say that 50% number out loud grabs people’s attention,” Cavendish said. When meeting with donors, it’s a data point that has helped them turn a $100,000 donation into $200,000 in matching donations over a matter of weeks, thanks to the exclusive nature of their content.

Learn from those who have gone before you

Don’t be afraid to ask for help from others doing similar work. Whether it’s talking about an internal tech stack or building a $1 million membership program, Cavendish said mentors from the Texas Tribune and Bridge Michigan helped him figure out what to do and, more importantly, what not to do.

“We talked to a lot of people about scale,” he said. “Our goal is to eventually grow to be the paper of record. That may be 10 to 15 years down the road. We are still building out the runway in order to get to that sustainability number. We look at what Bridge Michigan has done and they have a $1 million membership program. That’s our North Star and that drives a lot of our decision making.”