I’ve been starting and leading local journalism outlets for a long time—and for the last 23 years back here in my home state of Mississippi. My return-home-whether-or-I-wanted-to-or-not homing device had started buzzing when I was finishing up my mid-career master’s degree in journalism at Columbia in early 2001. I had actually come back to my hometown over spring break to work on a project about historic racism here, and it made me want to do more journalism in the place I’d fled the day after I graduated from Mississippi State in 1979. I had never reported in Mississippi until then.
For his part, my non-Mississippian life partner Todd Stauffer agreed to come here “for six months” because our legal Manhattan sublet was running out. Some of you will understand his pain on that front. So we moved into a fun duplex in Belhaven and then rented a second apartment on Fortification as my office—we were used to New York prices, and damn, Jackson seemed cheap—so I could write a book. Except September 11 soon happened, and my agent said the country wasn’t in the mood for my kind of questioning and context. So we started a newspaper instead in that apartment to cover the capital city region in a way that had, frankly, never been done, at least for long, despite valiant attempts by the 1960s Mississippi Free Press, the Kudzu and Bill Minor’s Capital Reporter.
For one, we actually believed (correctly) that we could build a truly diverse local reader base, and tell the truth about Mississippi’s history—and not just about 80-year-old retired Kluckers, but about systems and racism-created inequity of today—and actually succeed in local media. And we did, even if Todd (the publisher) and I skipped some paychecks here and there to pay our people. Still, we’re proud that we never laid anyone off.
Many of you know the story of how the JFP dropped like a truth bomb on Jackson and then became a force that challenged other media and journalists to do better and that built a new kind of news community in and around Jackson. It was a mixture of hard truth, joyful culture and people stories, and packed killer parties all over the city. If you’re a regular Mississippi Free Press reader, you also know that during my “warrior” recovery from breast cancer in 2019, I asked long-time JFP Associate Publisher Kimberly Griffin to start a nonprofit newsroom with me so that we could preserve all the JFP archives and reporting standards and tradition—and hopefully hire and then pay our team members better than we could at the JFP. Oh, and Todd could finally get back to his own delayed national career as she ascended to MFP publisher.
A new state nonprofit also would allow me to finally fulfill my dream of leading innovative, fearless journalism across all of Mississippi, from my hometown of Philadelphia to North Mississippi to the Coast and its waters to largely ignored cultures here. I had long wanted to cover and connect rural, suburban and urban communities that typical newsrooms have always largely ignored here (at least beyond sports, fairs and big events) such as the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, Spanish-speaking residents and more.
But here’s the thing: I’d been in journalism long enough to know how hard it is to do a quality and successful statewide news outlet. Early on,Todd reserved mississippifreepress.com and mississippifreepress.org for me and we kept them on a shelf, renewing every year for nearly two decades. I don’t let go of a good idea easily.
What Statewide Is, and Isn’t
Since 2002, I’ve thought and observed a lot about the problem with news outlets calling themselves “statewide.” Think about it: “Statewide” outlets are usually based in the capital city of a state or, yikes, in its suburbs. (Don’t get me started about newsrooms being invested and located in cities decimated by white flight.) The reporters are sent out to cover politics, state elections and legislative battles, often as a fun horse-race game. This tends to attract readership that enjoy politics as a sport—often the very men whom the legislation least affects and from the same pool as the “political reporters” and pundits as well.
Just listen to what Emily Wagster Pettus, who has been the best legislative and state reporter in Mississippi for over two decades until she recently retired, told state reporters when the Legislature honored her this month. “[E]ven as politics can seem like a game a lot of the times, it’s important as journalists not to get stuck in the rut of covering it like a game because the decisions made in this building are important and affect the lives of people who never set foot in here,” she advised on March 6. Emily is an ethical pro, and she never fell into the gamer trap. And I didn’t see reporters other than the MFP’s Heather Harrison quote her on that caution.
In this traditional “statewide” news paradigm, politics and power dominate over stories of the people that policy most affects or harms. You’ll find that, across the U.S., most legislative “political” journalism rarely if ever quotes the people on the ground back home in various states or parishes before or after legislation passes. Those folk are outside the “beltway,” to use Washington speak, and thus invisible.
This gamer model used to be successful for selling ads when for-profit newspapers were still a profitable American institution—but it has never been about all “the people,” many of whom can’t afford subscriptions for access or, as we call them today, “paywalls.” It was never a good journalism framework, though, and has long limited news readership and engagement. People who don’t feel seen do not support a news outlet. Repeat that three times.
For papers that call themselves “statewide,” as the Gannett-owned Clarion-Ledger did when we launched the JFP, it’s usually a marketing fib. It’s not like newsrooms have ever had either the goal or the resources to get out into Mississippi’s 82 counties and form a real presence, so they fixated on juicy stories that would sell newspapers (or today, increase clicks) and that often further victimize victims and increase distrust when they head back to the capital city. The Ledger, for instance, put sensationalistic (Black) crime coverage about Jackson on its front page constantly for much of its tenure with basically nothing reported on evidence-based crime prevention. I’ve long joked: “Don’t crimes happen in Vaiden for the statewide paper to cover? You wouldn’t know it if so.”
“Statewide” news has often been just bad business—how does an outlet based in or near Jackson try to convince a business in Senatobia or Pascagoula or Cleveland to advertise? A newsroom literally cannot cover every public meeting in 82 counties. It’s a math problem or, as Todd likes to call any doomed-to-fail journalism notion, “an interesting experiment.” He’s never been wrong about that, by the way, even if it can take a minute to prove him right.
Our Search for a New Local Journalism Model
Folks, I thought about this “statewide” conundrum for 20 years while leading and growing the Jackson Free Press newsroom. I wanted to do an MFP that would fill in coverage gaps especially in ignored areas (in the business, we call the less profitable areas “news deserts” these days)—and do the high-quality storytelling, talking-up-to-readers-never-down reporting that we were building as an institution for Jackson in every ZIP code here.
I realized over the JFP’s life, though, that the Mississippi needle could not be moved from Jackson by focusing mostly on the capital city, as vital as it is, while largely ignoring the rest of the state due to time and geography constraints. This haunted me, even as we did powerful, impactful reporting in other parts of the state when we could. It’s why the MFP is creating reporting bureaus around the state and our soon-launching news communities (see first sample microsite here) of focused coverage, connectors, dialogues and local events around the state, even as we’ve done top Jackson coverage with a dedicated reporter from the launch of the MFP and added more non-paywalled national coverage that Mississippians need.
But damn, actual “statewide,” county-by-county coverage is a hard model to pull off over an entire state. It’s why most “local” U.S. newsrooms don’t bother, or fail trying to recreate old models and then start focusing on a populous urban area again. And it’s why rural Mississippians are still too ignored, even those near Jackson in Hinds, Rankin and Madison counties. But it’s a problem we must solve to actually serve our people; to me, this business is too hard to be in it for any other reason but real service.
At first I rejected the idea of starting a nonprofit; I’m a writer, editor and a coach, and I didn’t want to raise money or have large donors trying to dictate coverage and daily decisions. And I wasn’t thrilled about being a startup-up again; not getting any younger, yada, yada. But a group of national nonprofit news leaders I stumbled into at a writer’s conference in upstate New York in 2019 convinced me otherwise. They allayed my fears (mostly; fundraising still worried me).
They told me two major things that shifted my thinking. First: Nonprofit media would become the new gold standard for journalism (if it could resist reverting to old habits and dominance desires), and it would require multiple good and funded nonprofit newsrooms to cover each state well and fill in reporting gaps. (Now, smart news entrepreneurs call that a “news ecosystem.”) Second: They said I should not think of a nonprofit Free Press as a startup; after all, I was the longest-tenured newsroom editor in the capital city and much of the state by then, and we came with an inclusive, dedicated audience, deep experience and tested systems. As for fundraising, one leader told me to create a product I believed in that worked to serve all Mississippians, and the funding would come. Besides, I could train in nonprofit development, he added. (Oh joy.)
All of that has proved out since I came home and pitched the MFP to Kimberly. They were right.
So, What Should ‘Statewide’ Actually Look Like?
I still had that intractable puzzle to solve, though. How do you cover an entire state well? I mean, newspapers back in the day and still in 2019 even with large newsrooms couldn’t pull it off well and inclusively in our nation, and too many still don’t due to muddled and misplaced priorities and too much horse-race B.S. and passionless pablum passing as journalism.
Not to mention, way too many news outlets are ego projects for their owners and founders more than service work; that fact has become very apparent in the last few months at national newspapers, as we all know, but it’s not new. Those men want money and control, to “beat” the competition, to “scoop,” to ignore or refuse to credit reporting they don’t “break,” to be the “first,” the “biggest,” the “only” … the blah, blah freaking blah. They may burn through team members and struggle with representation, but at least their control goals stay consistent.
This is no way to do journalism or serve the public. But what is? That was my burning question in 2019.
So when the JFP team gathered at The Cedars in Jackson in late 2019 for a retreat, Kimberly and I broke the news that we planned to start a nonprofit newsroom for reasons I’ve explained above. (Now-News Editor Ashton Pittman soon joined as our startup reporter, one of the best decisions I ever made, just as when I hired him at the JFP.) We made it clear to our long-time team that we couldn’t promise them jobs later, but hoped they would stay at the JFP and apply at the MFP when jobs were available. They were excited, and helped us brainstorm what a statewide publication could look like and the systems we could interrogate.
After launching the MFP five years ago this week as the pandemic hit Mississippi, we have carefully and steadily built on their plan—I call us the “tortoise that can”—and almost everyone of them eventually came to work at the MFP as Todd wound down the JFP as its own publication. Then our nonprofit purchased JFP’s journalism assets, we signed a new lease to keep the Capital Towers newsroom and community IdeaSpace (that’s on the door) in downtown Jackson we’ve loved for 12 years now, and here we are.
Meantime, I spent the first year of the MFP figuring out the “statewide” puzzle. It was early pandemic, of course, and Todd and I would get in the Miata and head out to counties across the state to get to know them; we called it “Driving History” (and there are even a few funny-serious YouTube videos of our adventures on his channel).
Y’all, those road trips solidified the “statewide” need for me. I realized how much I didn’t know about Mississippi—and I know a lot—as well as how divided and sectional, and thus beat-down, our state is, leading to hopelessness for so many. We saw crumbling towns and bridges and white flighters hunkered down in the county outside now-majority-black towns sucking out the resources just like in the capital city. We saw segregation academies next door to the public schools they stole resources from back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when they were blatantly all-white and now are just more coyly overwhelmingly white. (Oh, and “Christian,” of course, but I don’t think forced segregation is what Jesus would do.) We dug into history of white terrorism and race massacres and the heroes who fought back to stop it. We learned about the cads and colonels so much of our state is named for. We saw the communities and homes fallen into disrepair in areas with no jobs left but often proud beacons to the Confederacy among decay.
Our state’s priorities are upside down, and it’s damn hard to right them. But touring most of our counties, and doing research on them, showed me what was needed. My lightbulb moment: We needed to build a map for our journalism. I dubbed this emerging approach “Mapping Mississippi”—our umbrella name for our now-three-pronged approach to walking our “statewide” journalism talk.
It’s not just about facts and data. Good journalism must tell beautifully written stories about real people and systemic inequity infused with inconvenient and hidden facts (Mapping Mississippi prong 1), and it must convene real people across divides (not journalists or politicians on “expert” panels) to imagine solutions to local problems (Mapping prong 2); and to make all that work, 21st-century journalism must connect, map and network people, solutions and resources (Mapping prong 3). This trust-building/listening model isn’t linear; all three of these prongs must exist and work together—which is the literal opposite of believing that journalism is about dividing everybody in two boxes with the voice of the powerful and politicians dominating our coverage. Call it the antidote to horse-race reporting.
This was my eventual realization, and now the whole MFP team, working with community members and key connectors, is helping build out Mapping Mississippi as an innovative model to replace the old ways. We welcome your help and your ideas.
Oh, and notice that we have now imported almost all of the JFP news archives since 2002 into the new MFP website, making that vital reporting much more findable via a site or Google search. We thank both the AAN Publishers association and Google News Initiative for making this vital “marriage” happen. Go to the MFP search box and type in, say, “Frank Melton” or “James Ford Seale” or “Personhood” or “Jackson water” or “crime perception” or “One Lake” or “jackpot justice” and see what you missed at the JFP since 2002. Email kristin@mississippifreepress.org, the queen of this huge project and so many others, if you see problems in imported stories. And cheers to the kickass team at Newspack for helping the MFP buck the trend of newsrooms shutting down websites, thus, erasing vital community history and context. We, on the other hand, continually link and reference our older journalism to help readers understand complex issues, timelines and history.
As a news organization, there is no going backward to some glorious journalism past. We flatly reject the journalism models that never served all the people of Mississippi and America, or even really tried to because too many just didn’t matter to news leaders. We are living in a nation that is suffering from media-assisted division, but after 23 combined years leading the Free Presses of Mississippi and seeing a better way, I and our team know that industry change is possible and urgent. And we will do everything in our power in our next five, 10, 15, 50 years of growth to help connect people across our 82 counties to effect that change.
Join us. We’re here for the long haul.
Please support the people-first journalism of the Mississippi Free Press at mfp.ms/donate.
This MFP Voices opinion essay does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.