This marks the countdown to my leaving the best media team in the nation—I’ll fight you on that. This publisher’s note is not goodbye, but I’ll catch you later, dear friends and supporters.
In October 2007, Todd Stauffer, my former boss and the founding (and only) publisher of the Jackson Free Press, sent me an offer letter to join as a part-time sales coordinator. I was coming off a long illness and was thrilled to be working again. Part-time quickly became full-time, and eventually I was the associate publisher when we stopped publishing in 2022.
Todd and I were quite a pair—born around two months apart, both funny (though he can sing and do impressions) and, truly, you couldn’t find a better man or boss.
That letter was the beginning of my 18 years in combined Free Press journalism in my home state. Then, in 2019, at one of our favorite lunch spots in downtown Jackson, Donna Ladd, MFP’s CEO and my co-founder and Todd’s life partner, pitched the idea of starting a statewide nonprofit newsroom for Mississippi. Y’all, I thought she’d gone around the bend. Who launches a nonprofit when for-profit media is collapsing? I wanted to say, “Girl, are you OK?”…