The 2016 purchase by Gannett of Journal Media Group (Scripps' direct successor) effectively gave it control of the two major papers in western and central Tennessee, uniting the Commercial Appeal with Nashville's The Tennessean.

The Commercial Appeal won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its opposition of the Ku Klux Klan's operations in the region.

[6] In 1932, the newspaper moved into a disused Ford Motor Company assembly plant at 495 Union Avenue, where it stayed until 1977, when a new building was completed adjacent.

[9] Twenty Lake Holdings is a division of a hedge fund that has been accused of a "mercenary strategy" of buying newspapers, slashing jobs, and selling the buildings and other assets.

In 1868, it published an article by former confederate general Albert Pike that was critical of the methods of the Ku Klux Klan, but lauded their aims of white supremacy.

[13] Despite its Confederate background the paper won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for its coverage and editorial opposition to the resurgent Ku Klux Klan.

[14] The paper opposed the Memphis sanitation strike, portraying both labor organizers and Martin Luther King Jr. as outside meddlers.

This manipulation of The Commercial Appeal was part of the FBI's counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) against black nationalists in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The proposal was greeted by outrage among media analysts, so the authors of the so-called "monetization memo"—the Appeal's editor and its sales manager—quietly withdrew the effort.

[17] At the end of 2008, The Commercial Appeal posted a controversial database listing Tennessee residents with permits to carry handguns.

After a permit-to-carry holder shot and killed a man in Memphis for parking too close to his SUV and vandalizing it, the gun database suddenly came to the attention of pro-gun groups, including the NRA and the Tennessee Firearms Association.