BusinessTN

You hold in your hands the last print edition of BusinessTN magazine. After a six-year run, Tennessee's only statewide business and public affairs magazine is ceasing print production.

BusinessTN's brand of journalism is not going completely away. The brand will maintain a digital presence at www.businesstn.com, which will continue to serve as a vibrant daily repository of the most significant business news affecting Tennessee. Also, the magazine's popular e-mail products -- the BTN eBriefs and the BTN eWeekly -- will continue.

In BusinessTN's place, we will present a new publication focused on Middle Tennessee business, Nashville Post magazine. The new magazine piggybacks on the well-established breaking news business online source for the Nashville area, NashvillePost.com, a sister publication in the SouthComm Publishing corporate family. Now entering its tenth year as a respected business news outlet in Music City, the Nashville Post brand only stands to grow in its level of engagement and relevance to the Middle Tennessee marketplace with its own bimonthly print companion.

While the statewide print publication may be departing, it should not be taken as a sign that its mission is not still needed, if not indeed vital, to the economic health of our state as a whole.

Too often, a newly arrived corporation is blindly celebrated for the dollars it brings or the warehouse space it occupies. Too often, a business leader in Music City fails to recognize that a lesson learned in Obion or McMinn County is instructive to us all. For six years, BusinessTN strived to view the Volunteer State as something more than a collection of very different cities, each with its own economy and culture. What many dismissed as unavoidable historical divisions, we saw as healthy rivalries between people proud of where they live. But we also recognized that, if our state is going to compete in national and even global arenas, it needed to -- and still needs to -- understand that our real competitors lie across state lines, over country borders and, sometimes, on the other side of oceans.

That may sound grandiose, but in truth, the daily business of BusinessTN can be broken down to the fundamentals of responsible business journalism: We celebrated successes and detailed failures. We provided clear-eyed coverage not beholden to any special interest. We shined a spotlight on initiatives in one area that might be instructive to leaders in other parts of the state. We tried to be a voice for free market principles and, when necessary, used our bully pulpit to quicken the pace of progress among our policymakers. In doing so, we hope we lent an additional degree of credibility and sophistication to Tennessee's business profile.

Throughout it all, we saw a state full of very smart business people competing with the best in the world. We encountered thousands of community leaders with a shared hunger for intelligent reporting on the people, companies and trends that shape our combined economy.

After six years and 64 issues, we understand, better than most, that Tennessee is blessed with a diverse and dynamic business community. It was our privilege to be the only publication offering an informed look at its entire expanse. Thank you.