“[A]s the invaluable Mississippi Free Press tells us, the Lost Cause is still making mischief.”
– Esquire Magazine
MFP’s Biggest Impact Reporting
(See 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 2024 2025 and 2026 Impact)
At the Mississippi Free Press, publishing the story is only the beginning.
Great reporting doesn’t just expose; it inspires change. Since 2020, our journalists investigated and reported stories that have sparked action, influenced policy and a new voter-access law, connected people with resources, held leaders accountable and helped bring meaningful change to communities across Mississippi. These are more than headlines. They are reminders of what can happen when journalists ask the right questions, listen to the people’s concerns, keep digging, vet solutions and stay with the story long after it is published.
Following are select examples of our biggest-impact journalism. This Mississippi Free Press journalism brought powerful real-world, people-centered outcomes that prove the outsized difference that trusted, people-centered reporting can make in our state.
2020-26: Trusted Elections Project
Impact: Since 2020, the Mississippi Free Press’ Trusted Election Project has helped uncover hundreds of unannounced polling-place changes, including some made within a day of Election Day, as well as errors in the statewide system that risked sending voters to the wrong location to vote. Following MFP reporting, a new state law in 2025 now prohibits changes within 60 days of an election except in exigent circumstances. This work is ongoing, now focusing even more on voter-access reporting by bureau-level reporters across Mississippi to local newspapers to republish for free.
2026: Scholarships for Foster Children
Impact: After the MFP reported on the State of Mississippi denying 170 foster students full-ride scholarships due to budget cuts, several lawmakers began making calls to help rectify the situation. The Woodward Hines Education Foundation also stepped in to donate $800,000 to the program, with its leader citing MFP reporting at a press conference as the instigator of their joint efforts, and the students received their full scholarships. Lawmakers vowed to permanently fix the funding gap in the next legislative session.
2026: Makoka Brothers
Impact: After the MFP broke the news of the ICE arrests of Hancock High School students Israel and Max Makoka as they were boarding their school bus in April 2026, the story helped galvanize a local community across political race lines as they pressured local and national leaders to take action. Mississippi’s U.S. senators and a member of Congress intervened, and ICE returned the brothers to their host family in time for Israel Makoka to walk at his May graduation ceremony. Many state and national outlets followed our reporting, but the attorneys continued to give our reporter exclusive access due to the quality and immediate impact of our journalism.
2025: ICE/Immigration Investigations
Impact: An in-depth and viral MFP investigation of the ICE arrest and detention of Kasper Eriksen, a Danish husband and father of four in Sturgis, Mississippi, helped draw international attention to the story and spurred an avalanche of donations to his family. Amid outrage, ICE released Eriksen to his family in time for him to witness the birth of his fifth child.
2024: Bolivar County Gas Leak Deaths
Impact: The MFP brought widespread attention to the death of a mother and her child in an apartment in Cleveland, Mississippi, due to a gas leak. The Department of Housing and Urban Development later banned Millennia Housing Management from all new federal contracts for five years, citing mismanagement of properties across the country.
2021-2024: Jackson Water Crisis
Impact: MFP’s extensive reporting on the Jackson water crisis brought international and local attention to the crisis, beginning during the 2021 freeze that left residents without water for weeks, and again in 2022, when flooding left some without water for even longer. MFP’s deeply contextual, investigative reporting interrogated the long history that led to the crisis as well as the system failures that made it inevitable.
2021: University of Mississippi Emails
Impact: MFP reporting on a trove of University of Mississippi emails exposed the pressure that some administrators in academia feel to cater to the whims of wealthy donors. The reporting led to reforms in ethics rules on how officials interact with donors, as well as internal reviews and policy adjustment inside the UM journalism school. Our reporting on the targeting of the university’s ombuds likely helped get him reinstated.
2020: COVID-19, Race Disparities and ICE Detention
First-Year Impact: After the Mississippi Free Press reported that ICE detainee Salomon Diego Alonso was severely ill with COVID-19, ICE moved him to an intensive-care unit. Our COVID-19 coverage in the early weeks after MFP’s launch in March 2020 influenced a statewide examination of the racial disparities in those affected and the outcomes that had rapidly emerged in the early weeks of the crisis. We were the first outlet in the state to do in-depth reporting on that disparity and the reasons for it. Our COVID-19 work was cited in The New Yorker within three weeks of our launch.
Read more here about the MFP’s viral and impactful COVID-19 coverage in our first year.
The MFP has won 120 journalism honors since March 2020 launch; our Youth Media Project has won 21 awards to date. Also see media coverage of our work, story pickups and other impacts since 2020 here.
