NASHVILLE — No one was shocked last week when SouthComm Inc., a Nashville-based media company, announced it was selling The Nashville Scene, its flagship alternative newsweekly. SouthComm had already sold or was in the process of selling its newspapers in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Tampa and Washington. And alt-weeklies around the country have been declining for years.

Gone are The Baltimore City Paper, The Philadelphia City Paper, The Boston Phoenix. Last year, here in Tennessee, The Knoxville Mercury shut down. Also last year, Atlanta’s Creative Loafing laid off all but one person on the entire editorial staff. Even The Village Voice, the alt-weekly that invented alt-weeklies, now survives only online.

Seeing The Scene on the auction block might not be surprising, but it’s still heartbreaking. In a shortsighted effort to make the paper more appealing to buyers, SouthComm laid off some passionate, immensely talented journalists and seriously overburdened those who remained. Some of them are people I know because I once wrote for The Scene, and I have spent more than 20 years watching the difference this newspaper has made to my city.

In 1996, the summer my second child was born, I sent an envelope full of essays to The Nashville Scene. I was not a journalist — I was an English teacher on maternity leave — but the managing editor offered me a weekly column anyway. In time, I moved on to writing book reviews and then to editing them. In 2009, The Scene’s owners killed the book page in a round of cost cutting, but within months I was back, in a way: I had gone on to edit a new nonprofit website designed to compensate for dwindling book coverage in newspapers. The site, an initiative of Humanities Tennessee, offers local literary news to state media outlets at no charge in exchange for byline credit and a link online. The first paper to sign up for our content was The Nashville Scene. It is still our partner today.