Founder, Executive Director and Editor
Neshoba County native Donna Ladd is CEO, co-founder and editor of the statewide Mississippi Free Press and the Jackson Free Press, and is the director and founder of the Mississippi Youth Media Project. Her journalism focuses on white supremacy, race violence and systemic inequity (which she calls “systemic reporting”), and she contributes features and columns to The Guardian and has won over 150 national and regional journalism awards. Donna, raised by her illiterate mother, is a 1983 graduate of Mississippi State University with a degree in political science and received her master’s in journalism at the Columbia Journalism School in 2001, which awarded her an alumni award in 2021. Since returning to Mississippi in 2002, her investigative journalism has helped put a Klan murderer in prison and a Jackson mayor on trial … twice.
Contact: donna@youthmediaproject.com, 601-966-0834