The Commercial Appeal (also known as the Memphis Commercial Appeal) is a daily newspaper of Memphis, Tennessee, and its surrounding metropolitan area. It is owned by Journal Media Group; its former owner, The E.W. Scripps Company, also owned the former afternoon paper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar, which it folded in 1983.

The Commercial Appeal is a seven-day morning paper. It generally takes a liberal point of view regarding editorial positions. It is distributed primarily in Greater Memphis, including Shelby, Fayette, and Tipton counties in Tennessee and DeSoto, Tate, and Tunica counties in Mississippi. These are the contiguous counties to the city of Memphis.

In 1994, The Commercial Appeal won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning by Michael Ramirez.

History

The paper's name comes from a 19th-century merger between two predecessors, the Memphis Commercial and the Appeal.

The Appeal

The Appeal had an interesting history during the American Civil War. On June 6, 1862, the presses and plates were loaded into a boxcar and moved to Grenada, Mississippi. The Appeal later journeyed to Jackson, Mississippi, Meridian, Mississippi, Atlanta, Georgia, Montgomery, Alabama and finally Columbus, Georgia, where the plates were destroyed on April 16, 1865, only days before the Confederate surrender, halting publication temporarily of what had been one of the major papers serving the Southern cause. The press was hidden and saved, and publication resumed in Memphis, using it, on November 5, 1865. Another early paper, The Avalanche, was incorporated later in the 19th century. The paper is properly The Commercial Appeal and not the Memphis Commercial Appeal as it is often called, although the predecessor Appeal was formally the Memphis Daily Appeal.