Jackson Free Press

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Jackson Free Press landed in Mississippi in 2002, founded by Donna Ladd, a native of the state, alongside author and technology expert Todd Stauffer. From its first day, the magazine published simultaneously in print and online. It was available free of charge, distributed across Jackson and the surrounding suburbs. The name itself carried weight: it drew directly from the original Mississippi Free Press, a civil rights movement newspaper built by a multiracial coalition. That heritage asked a question the publication would spend years trying to answer. Could an independent alternative press survive and matter in a Southern capital city? What would it take to fight for that survival against a media giant? And what does it look like when a local outlet cracks open a cold case that has sat unresolved for decades?

• 2. Origins and Identity

  ›

  Donna Ladd and Todd Stauffer launched the Jackson Free Press as a biweekly publication, and within two years it had grown into a weekly. That shift, completed in May 2004, reflected an appetite among Jackson readers for more regular coverage. The magazine positioned itself as an alternative weekly, covering daily news from Jackson and nearby suburbs alongside entertainment reporting. Its funding came from advertisement revenue rather than subscriptions or cover prices. That economic model kept the publication accessible to anyone who wanted to pick it up. The deliberate echo of the civil rights-era Mississippi Free Press in the magazine's name was not accidental. It signaled a lineage and a set of commitments that would surface throughout the publication's history, most visibly when the editorial team pursued stories other outlets had set aside.

• 3. Fighting for Independence

  ›

  In 2006, Gannett Corp. and its newspaper The Clarion-Ledger put forward a distribution plan that would have forced independent publishers in Jackson to pay a fee and sign an exclusive contract. The Jackson Free Press did not face that challenge alone. It joined eight other publishers to form the Mississippi Independent Publishers Alliance, known as MIPA. The coalition built its own distribution network as an alternative to Gannett's terms. The conflict drew national attention, with coverage appearing in the Editor & Publisher trade magazine and in media outlets across the country. Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood opened an investigation into Gannett's plan. By 2009, Gannett shut down their distribution network entirely. MIPA's network remained operational, a concrete result of the coalition the Jackson Free Press helped organize.

• 4. The Seale Investigation

  ›

  In July 2005, the Jackson Free Press published a report that contradicted what most people believed about the fate of James Ford Seale. Seale had long been suspected of involvement in the 1964 abductions and murders of Charles Moore and Henry Dee, two men killed by Klan members in Mississippi. Previous media coverage had suggested Seale was dead. Donna Ladd and the magazine's team established that he was alive and living in Mississippi. That finding reopened a question that had been treated as closed. A renewed federal investigation followed. In 2007, Seale was indicted. The reporting demonstrated what a locally rooted publication could accomplish by returning to a story that larger outlets had abandoned.

• 5. Readers and Reach

  ›

  By 2007, the Jackson Free Press had a circulation of 17,000 copies and was reaching between 52,000 and 64,332 readers each week. A decade later, in 2016, print circulation had settled at 15,000, but the Circulation Verification Council's audit found roughly 37,500 weekly print readers and another 30,000 weekly visitors online. A 2016 survey painted a detailed picture of who those readers were: an average age of 43.7, with 53% female, around 93% having attended college, and a majority earning more than $50,000 a year. The magazine distributed in Hinds, Rankin, Madison, and Warren counties. Those numbers mattered for advertising, but they also described an audience that had made the Jackson Free Press a regular part of its week.

• 6. Awards and Transition

  ›

  The Jackson Free Press collected multiple Green Eyeshade and Diamond awards from the Society of Professional Journalists over the years. It received several awards from the Associated Press for the Louisiana and Mississippi region, and won multiple honors from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. Those recognitions tracked alongside internal changes at the magazine. In January 2021, Donna Ladd stepped back from her role as editor-in-chief, a position she had held for eighteen years, moving into a founding editor role. Nate Schumann was promoted to managing editor. A year later, in 2022, the magazine's journalism assets were sold to the Mississippi Journalism and Education Group, a nonprofit that owns and operates the Mississippi Free Press. That buyer was itself co-founded by Donna Ladd and Kimberly Griffin, who had served as associate publisher at the Jackson Free Press, completing a circle that had begun when Ladd first put the magazine into print two decades earlier.