OXFORD, Miss.—Last night, I hosted a heartwarming fundraising event at a friend’s lovely, art-filled home here in Oxford with locally based Director of Giving Cristen Hemmins. A big and inquisitive crowd showed up, including a former governor, some professors, entrepreneurs and a whole lot of women of various ages. With co-founder Kimberly Griffin home in Jackson with a bug, I greeted most of them at the door, with person after person asking me to tell the MFP’s origin story and more about the Jackson Free Press, which I had co-founded in 2001 down in the capital city region.
This is the kind of crowd you want when you talk about your labors of love and truth, leaning forward, nodding and laughing as I spoke about the trials, tribulations and successes of starting a “low-profit” community newspaper in 2001. They shake their heads when I shared that relied mostly on my partner’s credit cards and then learned how to run a business and never lay off anyone for 20 years even while sometimes skipping paychecks ourselves to keep the band together.
I also talked about our impact, our cultivated diversity and inclusion in staff, readership and coverage, and how we were basically a challenger brand to existing media—filling gaps and working to lift what was a mighty low bar for journalism in Mississippi then. I told them how Kimberly and I started the MFP in March 2020 as the pandemic hit Mississippi (releasing Todd to do other vital national journalism work) with a $50,000 donation and how we have rapidly built our current staff of 19 with three job notices out.
‘Not Really A Startup’
They were rapt as I described how we brought over the whole JFP team over time—except for one designer who stayed with Todd’s company and now freelances with us and our Youth Media Project—with the help of PPP loans on JFP’s end that kept folks employed as advertising imploded there with businesses closed, with some of them opting to work part-time there for half the day, then signing out and into the other organization for the
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