Roane County News
The Roane County News is the newspaper of Kingston, Tennessee, the county seat of Roane County, and the county's own long-running journal of record. Published from 204 Franklin Street in Kingston, it appears three times a week — on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays — a frequency unusual for a community paper of its size, and serves the whole of Roane County, including Harriman, Oliver Springs and Rockwood as well as Kingston itself. The title dates to December 1957, when the present Roane County News began publication as the successor to the Kingston Banner.
Roane County, in East Tennessee west of Knoxville, is a county of river towns and industrial history: Kingston sits at the confluence of the Clinch, Emory and Tennessee rivers on Watts Bar Lake, and the county's life runs from the courthouse square in Kingston to the Tennessee Valley Authority installations and lake communities that shape its economy. The Roane County News has covered that county, three issues a week, for nearly seven decades.
Beginnings in 1957
The Tennessee State Library and Archives dates the current Roane County News from 5 December 1957 to the present, recording it as a weekly that was briefly a semiweekly in early 1960 and noting that it continues the Kingston Banner. The Kingston Banner had published from October 1955 to the end of November 1957, and the Roane County News took up its role, appearing for a time in the late 1950s under the combined identity of the Roane County News with the Kingston Banner before settling into the name it still carries.
An earlier, distinct Roane County News had also appeared in Kingston in 1955, catalogued by the state library from March of that year. The 1957 paper is the one that lasted: it has been published in Kingston continuously from December 1957 to the present day, which makes it the longest-lived newspaper title in the county's long and crowded press history.
Kingston's Earlier Newspapers
Kingston supported newspapers for a century before the Roane County News arrived. The Kingston Gazetteer began in March 1854 and merged with the Kingston Eagle to form the Kingston Eagle and Gazetteer in 1855. After the Civil War the East Tennessean published in Kingston from 1865 to 1906 — one of the longest runs of any early Roane County paper. The Roane County Herald appeared in 1877, the Weekly Cyclone in 1881, and the Roane County Republican, which had been published in Rockwood in the early 1880s, moved to Kingston and ran into the 1890s.
The twentieth century brought another succession of titles: the Kingston Citizen from about 1918 to 1926, the Roane County Banner from about 1928 to 1949, the Kingston Tribune in 1948 and 1949, and the Kingston News from 1949 to 1953, before the Kingston Banner of 1955 led directly into the Roane County News. The pattern is the familiar one of county-seat journalism — many papers, most of them short-lived — and it underlines what the 1957 paper achieved by simply continuing, decade after decade, when its predecessors had folded.
Kingston and Roane County
The paper's home gives it a distinctive beat. Kingston was established in 1799, grew from Fort Southwest Point at the river confluence, and was Tennessee's state capital for a single day on 21 September 1807, when the General Assembly convened there under an agreement connected to a Cherokee land cession before returning to Knoxville. It has been the seat of Roane County since the county was created in 1801, and its courthouse business generates the steady core of a county paper's news: county commission, courts, schools and city government.
Modern Roane County adds the Tennessee River system to that agenda. Watts Bar Dam, built by the TVA between 1939 and 1942, impounded the Tennessee to create Watts Bar Lake at Kingston's doorstep. The TVA's Kingston Fossil Plant, completed in 1955 — two years before the Roane County News began — was at the time the world's largest coal-burning power plant, and its thousand-foot stacks are landmarks on the county's stretch of Interstate 40. When a fly-ash impoundment at the plant ruptured on 22 December 2008 and spilled more than a billion gallons of ash slurry into the surrounding area and waterways, the disaster and its long cleanup became the largest local story of the paper's modern era.
A Tri-Weekly Rhythm
Most American community papers publish weekly or, in larger markets, daily. The Roane County News settled into a rarer pattern: tri-weekly publication on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, as both media directories and the paper's own listings describe it. Advertising directories have described the paper as reaching approximately 9,000 readers in the Knoxville-area market it serves, and directory listings have associated it with the local ownership name Roane Newspapers.
Three issues a week changes what a county paper can do. County commission meetings, school boards, high school sports and court news can be reported while they are still news rather than gathered into a single weekly bundle, and readers in Kingston, Harriman, Rockwood and Oliver Springs get a publication cadence closer to a small daily than to a traditional weekly.
Publishers and People
Like most community papers, the Roane County News has been shaped by its publishers. In February 2004 Johnny Teglas was appointed publisher of the paper in Kingston. Teglas came to the post after two years as a public information officer for the Wise County School Board in Virginia, and before that had served the Norton Press, Inc. in a number of positions between 1981 and 2001 — a background in both community publishing and public communication typical of the small-paper publishers of the period.
The paper's office at 204 Franklin Street in Kingston, a few blocks from the Roane County Courthouse, has been its public face: the address listed for the paper in directories for years, with its telephone and fax lines handling subscriptions, advertising, legal notices and news tips for the whole county.
What the Paper Covers
The Roane County News covers the full agenda of a county seat and its surrounding communities: local news and government in Kingston and the county, the county's other municipalities including Harriman, Rockwood and Oliver Springs, business, education, sports, entertainment, opinion and letters, obituaries, classified advertising and public notices. Listings for the paper describe exactly that range — news, business, education, obituaries, opinion columns, letters, sports, entertainment, classifieds and public notices — organised around Roane County life.
Sister-publication relationships have also been part of its profile: directory descriptions of the Roane County News note its association with other East Tennessee community titles, including the LaFollette Press and the Morgan County News, reflecting the regional groupings through which small Tennessee papers have shared ownership, production and digital services.
The County's Other Towns
Although the paper is published in Kingston, its name announces its real territory: Roane County. Harriman, founded as a temperance town and long an industrial centre, Rockwood, with its iron and manufacturing history across the river from the old Cherokee village site, and Oliver Springs, a former resort and coal town at the county's northern edge, each generate their own councils, schools, sports and stories. A county paper that appears three times a week is built to move between those communities, and the News' online edition describes its coverage in exactly those terms — local news for Harriman, Kingston, Oliver Springs, Rockwood and Roane County.
That county-wide brief also covers the lake and river communities along Watts Bar, the TVA facilities at Kingston, and the Interstate 40 corridor that carries the county's commuters toward Knoxville and Oak Ridge.
Digital Presence
The Roane County News publishes online at roanecounty.com, where readers can read a digital copy of the latest edition of the paper as well as its ongoing local coverage, and it maintains an active social media presence, including a Facebook community built around Roane County news. Its tagline in its own descriptions is simple and comprehensive: the source for local news, sports, events and information in Roane County and Kingston, Tennessee, and the surrounding area.
The website has been produced with regional digital-media support — the site has carried a credit to 3B Media — and the paper's contact and staff addresses at the roanecounty.com domain reflect a fully digital newsroom operation behind the three-times-a-week print schedule.
An Award-Winning County Paper
Media directories describe the Roane County News as an award-winning newspaper serving residents in East Tennessee, and its longevity is itself a form of distinction. Of the long list of newspapers published in Kingston since 1854 — gazettes, citizens, banners, tribunes and heralds — only the Roane County News has published continuously from the 1950s into the present, through the decline of print advertising, the arrival of the internet and the consolidation of American community journalism.
The Record of Roane County
Nearly seventy years of three-times-a-week publication add up to an extraordinary local archive: thousands of issues recording Roane County's government, industry, schools, disasters and celebrations from 1957 onward, held on microfilm by the Tennessee State Library and Archives from the paper's first issue to the present. For the county that was Tennessee's capital for a day, that hosts one of the TVA's landmark power plants and that lives along Watts Bar Lake, the Roane County News remains the paper that writes it all down — every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
