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 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…