Twenty-two years ago this month my co-founder Donna Ladd and her life partner and my former boss and mentor Todd Stauffer opened the Jackson Free Press. The two landed in Mississippi right before 9/11, intending to stay for six months so Donna could work on a big reporting project. Donna, a Neshoba County native, had left Mississippi the day she graduated from Mississippi State University, vowing never to return, but the universe had other plans.
Donna and Todd, along with Stephen Barnette, another Mississippian who wanted to see a better Jackson, started the Jackson Free Press with a few simple goals in mind: to stop the sensationalizing of underrepresented communities; to help bridge social and knowledge gaps between community across race and class lines; to counteract the narrative that Jackson was a war zone; and to prevent folks from running to the burbs for dining and events.
And so began a paper that served the capital city and all its people. They even put the first-ever Best of Jackson awards ballot in the first issue of the JFP—then launching one of the city’s biggest (and most diverse) annual parties that celebrated local businesses and people. The news coverage went beyond headlines and instead asked what’s actually going beyond sound bites and examined systems.
At some point about 13 years ago, my play sister, as we say in the Black community, held up the paper and said: “These are your people; you should go work for them.” I was coming off a long illness and figured I had nothing to lose. Over the years, I went from part-time to full-time to associate publisher. And I learned what it takes to do essential journalism that serves the entire community and builds the kind of inclusive support bases that elude most U.S. newsrooms.
During the last several years of our existence, it became harder and harder to sell print ads as the for-profit news industry changed. We were far luckier than some in our world because capital-area folks still liked the feel of newsprint in their hands, so the decline in print revenue
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