A lot happened to me in 2019. It was one of those years that both asked questions and then answered as I recovered from breast cancer and worked to stay calm and focus on survival throughout—both of myself and the journalism organization I had worked with our team to build since 2002.
The Jackson Free Press was an extremely popular weekly and impactful newspaper in the capital-city region. So much so that many young professionals and supporters now tell me they “grew up reading it” and “it had a huge influence on me.” But the JFP was always a financial struggle with my co-founder and life partner, Todd Stauffer, and I sometimes skipping a paycheck in order to never lay anyone off. And of course, due to the digital shift and the tanking of print advertising, by 2019, we were facing the question of when rather than if we would need to close our doors.
Basic math was coming home to roost.
But three things kept me from a quick decision to shut it down, delete the site and go write full-time (which I still want to get around to eventually). That is, our deep influence in the Jackson community; the need to preserve archives of essential journalism no other outlet would touch; and our remarkable long-time staff members still with us through thick and then because they believed in and respected each other and the truth-telling we were doing for Mississippians.
Long story short, I ended up recovering from my second surgery at a writer’s retreat in upstate New York in spring 2019. While I was there, the facility also hosted a gathering of top nonprofit media leaders. Several of them encouraged me around a firepit to go home and go nonprofit—because “you’re not really a startup” after 17 years of top Mississippi journalism, one told me. Another said simply: “You can’t let the Free Press die. Your state needs you.” Besides, one said, “Nonprofit news is the future. Every state needs more than one or two.”
He was right. For nearly 20 years, we’d watched the Gannett Corp. work to decimate “local” news in Mississippi and their vicious anti-competitive practices aimed at the Jackson Free Press and other local publications because they wanted their Clarion-Ledger, still owned and run outside the state, to be the “only” statewide news outlet and, of course, to win the “who’s biggest?” game.
I’d had the URL mississippifreepress.com reserved since 2001 because I craved to do for the whole state what we had done in Jackson. But advertising couldn’t sustain statewide on the for-profit side. After the fireside chat, though, I began to see that reader-driven, nonprofit revenue streams just might be able to, finally, fix local journalism. The nonprofit folk had told me that we already had the magic sauce that inspires larger donations and grants and longevity: a strong local reader support base.
So I went home to Mississippi and told Todd I might finally be able to spring him from the Jackson Free Press so he could do the (more lucrative than skipping paychecks, let’s be honest) tech-meets-journalism work that he is helping lead in the nation now. To take his place, I took his No. 2 on the sales side of the JFP, Kimberly Griffin, to Basil’s for lunch and popped the question.
“Would you start a statewide nonprofit newsroom with me?” I asked her. She stared with her fork frozen halfway to her mouth. (OK, the fork is probably apocryphal.) I told her we could likely pay our people better. She then said yes.
And the rest, as they say, is local-news history.
Drawing Inspiration from the Pandemic
To be honest, my vision for how we would manage truly local coverage across 82 counties was still fuzzy then, in its formative stage. But as the universe would have it, the pandemic literally changed everything, even as reporting star Ashton Pittman (MFP’s only full-time hire away from JFP for months) and I decided to throw up a temporary site and launch systemic reporting about pandemic disparities the day we went home from the JFP to quarantine.
But it was actually Todd and me escaping the house on the weekends in his Miata to “drive history”—and look closely at—counties across Mississippi that crystallized my vision to center the people of our state and how historically (and purposefully) broken systems harm and limit them generationally.
Put simply, I was angered by all the crumbling towns and obvious small-town white/wealth flight that left them struggling for basics. Archie Manning’s hometown of Drew, for instance, is one that sticks out in my memory as a place left behind with systemic and historic challenges by folks with the means to rebuild elsewhere rather than invest in the place where their families are buried. (Read Delta reporter Jaylin Smith’s recent piece on Drew.)
Then, Kimberly and I started talking about how Mississippi is “sectional”—with regions with shared interests and concerns, but little communication (or hope) about solving ingrained disparities from region to region. Maybe one county had a good solution, but people living even 50 miles away had no inkling of it in our news-deserted state, where “statewide” media had long been about partisan politics in our capital city—and let’s be honest, racist crime hysteria even as they ignored violent white gangs in Jackson’s suburbs. Not to mention very little historic context about why things are as they are for so many Mississippians.
“People need to know and listen to each other,” she and I agreed. Otherwise, little would change for the people of Mississippi.
So the plan for “Mapping Mississippi”—and eventually our eight-bureau plan for local coverage and regional microsites; mapping tools to help teach, connect and solve; as well as the solutions circles I had designed with a group of Jackson teenagers pre-pandemic—was born. It is now our evolving roadmap and our guidepost for covering and honoring our home state in a way the media has simply never bothered to try.
All the while, both Kimberly and I knew we were building a very special and different news organization staffed and run by long-time Mississippians (mostly)—and we both knew we were building it to hand it off to future generations. We started the MFP to train and attract leaders who wanted to and could take the reins. That is happening now, and it is a joy and exhilarating to behold as we’ve used previous mistakes and lessons to build a remarkable team that has now worked together a combined total of 100+ years.
It can also be sad.
You Just Can’t Fake ‘Local’ Journalism
When we launched the MFP in March 2020, I knew the day would come when either Kimberly or I had to tell the other, and then the team, that it was time to move on. So when she came to me last summer to have the succession conversation, I wasn’t surprised, although of course it felt like a gut punch at first. But as someone who is 10 years older than she is, I totally understood her need to avoid burnout—which isn’t good for the team, either—and move to what is next for her, as she described here better than I can.
If there is a leadership lesson I learned at the JFP, and I learned many, we should never try to bar the door when someone really is ready to leave; it will always backfire. And like Kimberly, good people who care about the organization and the team will work hard to leave their co-workers and organization in a strong place. All of us will miss her gregarious personality and will always honor our publisher emeritus’ role in growing us to this point.
As good leaders do, she is leaving at a time when we have a larger, excellent revenue team—chosen with succession on the brain—in place: soon-to-be Publisher Tami Jones, Audience Manager Chris Ellis and Marketing/PR Coordinator Erica Powe. Kimberly is stepping back and allowing them to lead as she completes her transition, but is there to help as needed. This is the way.
We are a different organization now. In the early years, Kimberly and then-Director of Giving Cristen Hemmins handled daily fundraising, as I worked with Ashton to build a news team and traffic and ran the business side and targeted larger gifts. We had to learn the nonprofit journalism industry from the ground-up, and while we still don’t know everything about it, we’ve come a long, long way. And now we have far more help and so many natural leaders eager to step up.
Along the way, we’ve stayed the course of my original vision like a homing pigeon: Build statewide coverage county-by-county on the ground and build our bureau system with actual local reporters in eventually eight regions. When we stick the full landing, each bureau will have its own substantive microsite, events listings, solutions circles, systemic cause-solution reporting and on-the-ground focus. We have not once veered from this cohesive vision to provide people-first coverage. This hyperlocal fixation, without following the shiniest object, is what local news must be to effect real change, not packing a boatload of reporters into the Legislature to cover the game of politics while largely ignoring the people those public servants represent.
Repeat after me: The people are the experts on what Mississippi needs, not billionaires, politics and local celebrities.
To help a state and all its people solve problems and thrive, you have to first listen deeply. Our job at the MFP is not as lobbyists, but as systems interrogators and storytellers in 82 counties. I think of Features Editor Nate Schumann meticulously tracking where his Person of the Day and essential culture assignments are—and his pride when he announced recently that our reporting had made it to all 82 counties. This local obsession matters, even if most newsrooms think “local news” means “political reporting” (an empty phrase we don’t use).
As a Black woman from a rural county who grew up in Jackson, Kimberly understood this need from that day I shocked her in Basil’s. She knows that people who look like her are virtually ignored in most “local” journalism—usually owned and run outside states like ours—except in occasional savior-type stories done sporadically to win awards and claim “impact” even where there’s been none.
Most journalism is obsessed with what the powerful think and say; we are focused on the effects of power games and neglect on real people across 82 counties and eight bureaus. That is local news. You just can’t fake it. The people know.
Thank You for Everything, Kimberly
I will also step aside at some point, and I expect folks will be thrilled at my choices (and probably not surprised) when I get around to it and announce my planned successors, who are already making my life so much easier. But I’m not going anywhere yet after nearly 24 years of visioning and leading Free Press journalism in Mississippi. Good leaders build, teach, learn, listen, equip and eventually move aside. But I will be sure that the organization is as strong as possible when I fully hand over the reins, I promise.
For now, I am doing what I do: Stepping back and allowing team members to lead without me in their way and focusing my efforts and visioning where they need me the most at a given time. For 2026, that means explaining, building, funding and staffing the bureaus; ensuring we keep growing like we did this year (our readers increased over 100% and our traffic nearly 100% over last year due to a larger team and enterprising work!).
I’m helping direct a new Impact Roundtable Zoom series (Stuart Stevens joins us on Jan. 13 to talk nonpartisan voter access and diversification solutions). I’m moving around the state and nation, helping facilitate solutions circles, building relationships and doing public talks about how the MFP is unique and how our innovations are replicable. (Write erica@mississippifreepress.org if I or other MFP leaders can talk to your group in or out of state.) And I look forward to working with our reporters to share my narrative-writing expertise, especially for their longer systemic- and history-focused pieces across Mississippi, which will increase in 2026 thanks to our growing reporter base.
But even as the new year is filled with possibility, I will always remember fondly the early long days of Kimberly, Ashton, Cristen and me grinding to figure out nonprofit media and grow our systemic and beyond-partisan approach across this entire state. They then helped me build a foundation for an innovative journalism organization that doesn’t condescend to our home state of Mississippi, but that believes daily in our potential for greatness and solutions by working together. Others have long taken from our state, but we can give back together.
When she moves on to a different ship and her next exciting chapter, I will miss Kimberly Griffin as my partner in an idea that many thought impossible, especially as the brainchild of two women of a certain age from rural Mississippi, one Black and one white. I will miss rolling our eyes together about the sexism that still can make it hard for the industry and some potential donors to take us seriously despite our depth of experience, knowledge and innovative approaches. And I will miss the times she “went off” on people who overtly disrespected either me or one of her team members.
Still, I will also know that the MFP publisher emeritus will always be only a phone call away for us. Thank you for everything, Kimberly. We’ll always keep the light on for you.
This MFP Voices opinion essay reflects the personal opinion of its author(s). The column 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.