Lesli Bales-Sherrod, SOC/MA ’04, appears in the archives of The Standard Banner long before her byline ever does.
While she officially began her journalism career at the Jefferson County, Tennessee, weekly at age 16—typing up sports scores and obituaries after school—her history with the newspaper goes much further back. Dig through the yellowed clippings in the morgue, and you’ll find her first birthday announcement from 1978, where she’s pictured wearing nothing but a “Born to Boogie” T-shirt.
For nearly 50 years, the paper has been the record of her life. So, when the opportunity arose to purchase the publication in 2022, the headline practically wrote itself: Reporter Buys Local Paper That Launched Her Career.
But the story wasn’t that simple. When Bales-Sherrod first considered the idea, her reaction was immediate skepticism. “I can’t buy a newspaper,” she told herself. “That’s ridiculous. Who buys a newspaper?”
To Bales-Sherrod, purchasing a publication seemed like a venture reserved for the wealthy—or the delusional. She was a middle-class journalist with “a mortgage, two children, two cats, and a car payment”—not a media tycoon. She had built a successful career in communications and editing, far removed from the precarious economics of the print industry. But the owner, Dale Gentry, who was itching to retire, was adamant: He would only sell the paper that had been in his family for three generations to a local who would carry the torch.
Bales-Sherrod eventually agreed to a meeting with Gentry in February 2025. Like any good reporter, she arrived at his home with a notebook full of questions, determined to keep her expectations low. She left with a revelation.
“When he gave us a price, I about fell off of his couch,” Bales-Sherrod says. “He was offering to sell us a newspaper for less than what you can buy a house for.”
Suddenly, the math changed, and on July 30, Bales-Sherrod and her husband, Jimmy Sherrod, became co-owners and copublishers of the weekly Standard Banner, circulation 5,000.
Bales-Sherrod’s return to the paper was a homecoming in the truest sense. She had grown up in the newsroom off Old Andrew Johnson Highway, learning the trade from editors who treated her like a professional long before she had the credentials of one.
She recalls one pivotal moment from her college years: She was 18 and home from Middle Tennessee State University on a break when a murder rocked the quiet county. Gentry was at a press association meeting in Nashville, and the senior staff writer was on vacation. So the coverage of a homicide fell to a teenager.
When she arrived at the sheriff’s department, the scene was chaotic. Media crews from Knoxville—30 miles to the west—had descended, looking for sound bites. Bales-Sherrod stood frozen on the sidelines, daunted by the lights and the competition. But then the sheriff—who knew her from the countless hours she had spent typing in police reports at the station for The Standard Banner—intervened.
“He was like, ‘Hang on,’” she remembers. “He gave his press conference. Then the Knoxville media left and he was like, ‘Come on in here, and I’ll tell you what’s going on.’”
It was a formative lesson in the value of community journalism. “When you’re in a small town, the big-city paper, they’re only going to care when it’s something sensational. We were covering the sheriff’s department day in and day out,” she says.
That ethos followed her to AU in 2003. While some of her grad school peers boasted experience at major dailies, Bales-Sherrod carried the distinct scrappiness of a small-town reporter. At the School of Communication, she embraced the concept of “convergence”—the idea that a modern journalist must be a jack-of-all-trades, comfortable with print, digital, and broadcast. It was training that would prove essential two decades later as she found herself running a business that requires her to manage a printing press, a website, and a social media strategy simultaneously.
Before signing the paperwork in 2025, Bales-Sherrod turned to her AU network for a reality check. She called Amy Eisman, a former journalism professor who had remained a mentor.
“I have an opportunity to buy a newspaper,” Bales-Sherrod told her.
Eisman cackled. “Who gets to buy a newspaper?” she asked, mirroring Bales-Sherrod’s own disbelief.
But the conversation that followed was critical. Eisman and a colleague advised Bales-Sherrod to reframe the acquisition. Don’t think of it as buying a newspaper, they advised. Think of it as buying a media company. The ink and newsprint were merely the current format—the real assets were the paper’s goodwill and deep roots in the community.
“We were buying the reputation—and the relationships,” Bales-Sherrod says. “That was a great shift in my mentality.”
Walking into The Standard Banner offices on her first day as owner, Bales-Sherrod felt a flutter of nerves. The physical space had evolved—the cubicles she once sat in were now a conference room housing the paper’s archives—but the people were largely the same.
Her staff of 10 includes employees with staggering tenure; the longest-serving member has been there since 1982. Bales-Sherrod worried that these veterans, who had known her since she was a high schooler, would struggle to see her as a boss.
But her fears were unfounded. The staff, who had been anxious about a potential corporate buyout or closure, were relieved to see a local face—especially one they had helped raise. They greeted her with hugs and sighs of relief.
Among them was Steve Marion, the writer who had taught Bales-Sherrod how to interview sources in the late ’90s. Now, she was his editor.
“A lot of the things I do are completely stolen from Steve,” she says. “The way that he interviews people, the way that he makes people feel so comfortable. It really felt so nice to come back and be like, ‘I still love this thing that I used to love, and it all started with you.’”
Under Bales-Sherrod’s leadership, the paper remains fiercely local. In her editor’s letter, she laid out her vision: “The Standard Banner records our collective history, one issue at a time.”
This means covering the hard news—city councils, courts, and school boards—but also the “Little Elks” of Jefferson Elementary. It means running long-form features on a local couple inducted into the Taxidermy Hall of Fame and preserving the “snapshot of life” in Jefferson County so that future generations can look back at their own yellowed clippings.
Bales-Sherrod laughs about a recent listing in the paper touting a “Cream of Wheat buffet” at a local senior center, complete with toppings like chocolate chips and raisins.
Her best friend texted her about it, tickled by the specificity. But Bales-Sherrod defends it with the seriousness of a publisher who knows her audience. “You need to know what day you’re going to go eat your Cream of Wheat,” she says with a smile. “That is exactly why the product that we put out is not something that can be duplicated.”
Six months into her editorship, Bales-Sherrod has settled comfortably into her new role. The work is demanding—she is learning how to order newsprint, manage a press, and navigate the supply closet—but the anxieties she anticipated haven’t materialized.
“Even when it’s hard, it’s still fun,” she says. “Every day is so much fun.”
The community has embraced her return, filling the office with potted plants and words of encouragement. But for Bales-Sherrod, the real reward is the permanence of the work. Every week, she sends the paper to press knowing she is curating the archives for the next generation. Someday, she hopes, another homegrown reporter will dig through these files, stumble upon a photo of a local kid, and realize they are holding their own history in their hands.