BusinessTN

Plenty of locals snickered 14 years ago that the then-new First Amendment Center would be little more than a retirement home for end-of-the-line Gannett Co. reporters, editors and executives. But the subsequent schedule of guest lectures, journalism training classes and televised events allowed that early suspicion to mostly fade away.

Now, there is again cause to question the vitality of this notoriously big spending organization founded to protect First Amendment freedoms through information and education. Official claims to the contrary, today’s First Amendment Center is cutting a lower national profile on the issues it was set up to defend, namely the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment—religion, speech, assembly and petitioning the government for a redress of grievances.

Over time, its staff has shrunk to roughly 22 people. The well-appointed building at 18th Avenue S. and Edgehill Avenue, with its series of empty rooms and unmanned computer stations, echoes a hollowness in the footsteps of visitors.

No doubt the greatest contributor to the present situation is the changed spending priorities of the foundation that created the center. The Freedom Forum, which began life as the Gannett Foundation in 1935, has deployed more than half its current $718 million in net assets to erecting the Newseum, an interactive news museum originally developed in Arlington, Va. To secure a higher-profile Washington location on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol, the Freedom Forum invested a staggering $100 million just to obtain the land. A few hundred million dollars more on the museum itself and that’s how the not-for-profit blows through a reported $400 million on the project.

At about the same time, the Freedom Forum’s finances were dealt a setback by the falling stock market, which cut heavily into the one-time $1 billion foundation. Partly in response, Freedom Forum branch and satellite centers in London, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, New York and San Francisco have been shuttered since 2000. Only the Washington and Nashville centers remain.

More recently, the Nashville outposts of the Freedom Forum have witnessed the departure of two senior officials. A year ago, Ken Paulson, the former director of the First Amendment Center, left to take the top editorial post at Gannett’s USA Today. Also departing for a Gannett journalism job was Wanda Lloyd, founding executive director of the Freedom Forum’s Diversity Institute—a nonprofit that retrains minorities in mid-career or upon college graduation for careers in journalism.

Lionized former Tennessean editor John Seigenthaler, who founded the center in 1991 and for whom its Nashville building is named, acknowledges he’s spending more time with his grandson in Connecticut these days, but says the First Amendment Center’s flagship programs remain intact: the Moot Court competition, which brings law students to compete on First Amendment issues; Freedom Sings, which takes a group of singers across the country to perform songs banned from networks, and the Diversity Institute, which this year had its largest class ever—15 students.

“We made a major commitment to Nashville,” adds Freedom Forum Executive Director Charles Overby, who maintains dual residences in Washington and Nashville. “I don’t see a diminishment [of our work there].

That would be a good thing. The First Amendment would be more secure with a center that’s engaged in the fight rather than one destined to become a Newseum relic.