A beautiful thing happened in downtown Jackson ast week. A group of leaders and team members from newsrooms in states across the Deep South came to our building, Capital Towers, on May 18 to talk about the future of journalism for local, independent media outlets.
LION Publishers had asked us to host the first Deep South Media Sustainability meetup months ago. I quickly suggested holding it in our building with our sweeping views of Mississippi’s capital city. Our newsroom is within walking distance to courthouses, City Hall, the Mississippi Capitol, the police and sheriff’s departments, restaurants and museums—the most central spot for news-gathering and confabs in our state that I can imagine.
The Jackson Free Press, and since 2022 the Mississippi Free Press, has been right here, investing in our city’s center, for nearly a decade of 21 years of Free Press journalism here, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Our LION guests could even walk to Two Museums, where they toured the remarkable and essential Mississippi Civil Rights Museum before a Hal & Mal’s happy hour, where the LION team was surprised to learn the Free Press veggie burger is named for us!
The Institute for Nonprofit News gathered INN members present for LION Publishers’ Deep South Media Sustainability meetup in Jackson for coffee and donuts in the Mississippi Free Press newsroom in Capital Towers before going upstairs for the official meetup. Photo by Donna Ladd
After many of the attendees first had coffee, donuts and fellowship in our newsroom on the 13th floor, we all headed upstairs to talk about sustainability challenges facing local journalism outlets as some close and many other local newsrooms, especially nonprofits, open and then must figure out how to grow and thrive.
Good journalism costs money. Some new newsrooms have huge funding and billionaire founders; others started with something like $50,000 (like the Mississippi Free Press did in March 2020) or far less as some of the attendees disclosed. There was even a lovely woman running an Arkansas outlet all by herself.
A Sticky Question of ‘Scale’
The key focus