New Banner masthed

This isn’t your grandparents’ Nashville Banner. But naming their new online public service journalism project after a paper shuttered 22 years ago was both an homage and a no-brainer, say Steve Cavendish and Demetria Kalodimos, the driving forces behind the venture that will launch later this year.

Why go last-century with the name instead of something that connects with a new Nashville audience?

Speaking at The Filming Station, Kalodimos’s production facility on Eighth Avenue S., in a free-flowing conversation that often saw them completing each others sentences, the veteran journalists agreed that brand recognition was a factor.

“I graduated from Belmont in 1993 on a Saturday, and Monday morning I was working at the Banner. I’d been interning there the semester before and I was cheap,” Cavendish says with a laugh. “So they were happy to have me keep working for peanuts.

“But I loved the Banner. It gave me great opportunities. I worked all over the country and came home in 2011. And the Banner still resonates in this market.”

“Yeah,” Kalodimos says. “Not only is there sentimental value to the name, you know, it was …”

Old Banner masthed

“Brand ID,” Cavendish interjects.

“Yeah, brand ID,” Kalodimos continues. “I mean, why invent a new name if such a great one is sitting there?”

“And by the way, it was literally just sitting there,” Cavendish states “When Gannett let the trademark on it lapse, and Bruce Dobie (a former Banner reporter and Nashville Scene editor) picked it up a few years ago and is graciously – I don’t want to say giving it to us – he’s agreed to sell it to us for a very low, low, low, low price.”

Another homage to the past is the new Nashville Banner masthead, a tribute to the American eagle symbol that anchored the top of the front cover every weekday afternoon. It is similar, yet different, and only sharp-eyed viewers will catch some of the changes.

“I was part of the staff that redesigned the Banner in 1995. It was one of the last things I did before I left,” Cavendish recalls. “And we wanted to bring back the old eagle because the old eagle was really cool. That was also really messed up and needed to be redrawn.

“The originals didn’t exist, and all you had were essentially copies of copies and copies of copies. And so that’s when you find versions of the old eagle online, they’re really degraded. They started doing spot cover in weird places on them over the years.

“So we wanted to bring back that version of the eagle. And Irby (Simpkins, publisher and part-owner) would not let us do it. He wanted to keep the kind of, uh …”

“The little stylized kind of eye,” Kalodimos interjects.

“Yeah, we called it the whatever – the Muppets’ eagle,” Cavendish says to lots of laughs.

The new Banner banner was designed by famed scratchboard illustrator Kent Barton, a former newspaper illustrator who is known for his work with Burt’s Bees, The New Yorker, Time, Pepsi, The Franklin Mint and Parker Brothers, among others.

“One of the first things I wanted to do was have somebody redraw that. And a buddy of mine who’s an art director knew scratchboard illustrator Kent Barton,” Cavendish notes.

“And so this is all scratchboard. If you blow it up, you can still actually see all the scratches in there. He did the whole thing on scratchboard. His main client is Burt’s Bees – so when you see the little lip balm things, he’s the guy who drew the bee-beard. And he’s an amazing illustrator.”

Cavendish says the direction the eagle is facing is the most obvious change.

“So we started having conversations about it because I wanted to put a couple of little Easter eggs I wanted to put in there,” Cavendish says. “Like we flipped the orientation of the eagle. He was facing that way, now it’s this way because it’s a new era.

“We changed the flagpole to a pen. We put an extra arrow in. The old version had two, and there’s three in this one.

“He did a spectacular job with the eagle. And then my buddy, Michael Whitley, he’s actually going to serve on our board, he used to be a masthead editor at the Los Angeles Times, he actually hand-drew the Banner nameplate for us.”

And so, the old is new again.