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The YMP's origin story: The seeds went into the ground for the Mississippi Youth Media Project almost a decade ago after Jackson Free Press co-founder and editor-in-chief Donna Ladd spoke to a group of Jim Hill High School students and teachers at the Jackson Zoo about the unfair and incomplete way that most mainstream media cover young people, especially young people of color. After telling them about a youth project in the Bronx in New York City in which young people examined how The New York Times covered young people, the group started meeting in the Jackson Free Press offices to brainstorm on how to teach media literacy in Mississippi and, ultimately, help young people learn to "be the media" in the state to positively affect the public narrative about their own lives.

Over the years, what was called "YMP" took a variety of forms. One summer, a diverse group of young people examined local media coverage and producing a special issue of the Jackson Free Press. In other summers, high-school students came together to learn media skills and publish a blog, engage with mentors and speakers, study professional and soft skills, and have many in-depth discussions in the JFP offices.

In June 2016, YMP grew up into something bigger and separate from the Jackson Free Press in the first full-time summer intensive project with its own inspiring newsroom in the old Associated Press offices. Then a W.K. Kellogg Leadership fellow, Donna Ladd joined with four other fellows to introduce the new YMP as their leadership project, with a diverse team of teachers, trainers and mentors. The project offered writing, video, podcasting, photography, web design, soft skills, and entrepreneurial media training and mentoring. The YMP "school" included a variety of workshops and speakers in those areas with the goals of teaching standards that help the teens in their academic success, while giving teens the experience of participating in the startup atmosphere of a student media project and eventual launch of their own web publication, which the students named jxnpulse.com.

In Spring 2017, YMP piloted its first school partnership program with the Wingfield High School (WHS) Fine Arts, Athletics, Mathematics and Engineering, or FAME, program, an initiative that provides an alternative to the traditional school day for students who have discipline issues or are behind on credits. The FAME program aims to prevent school dropout—approximately one-third (76 students) of the 226 students who dropped out of JPS in 2008-2009 were from WHS. To combat high dropout rates at WHS, YMP served around 15 FAME students from 9th through 12th grades each week to learn career technical skills with a focus on technology innovation and multimedia skill development. In the first three months of the program, WHS students published completed photojournalism packages online at the jxnpulse.com site. Three of the students also helped organize Jackson’s first Youth Mayoral Forum, with two in the media panel on-stage interviewing candidates.

A number of YMP students, like those from Wingfield High School, are young people living in poverty at the highest risk of committing crime, which many have witnessed from a young age. Students use media tools to connect with peers, adults, and their communities through constructive dialogue, collaboration, and navigating differences, biases, and conflicts to build strong relationships in a safe environment of empathy and forgiveness. YMP uses real stories to change the larger media and public narrative, and thus policies, that affect young people in Mississippi, and YMP promotes race dialogue, teaches equity principles and historic truths, and fosters positive relationships in an open, safe environment. YMP training is free to students and families. 

Youth Media Project Founder

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Donna Ladd
YMP founder Donna Ladd is a journalist and editor from Philadelphia, Miss. In 2002 she helped launch the Jackson Free Press and later BOOM Jackson magazine. Ladd has won numerous national writing and reporting awards, including for leading a diverse team of young Mississippi journalists to help her investigate the 1964 Henry Dee-Charles Moore murders alongside the CBC, ultimately bringing James Ford Seale to justice. Ladd received a B.A. in political science from Mississippi State University in 1983. In the mid-career program at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 1999, she developed a social-justice focus for her studies in the Columbia Law School, Teacher's College and the Institute for African American Studies, in addition to the journalism school. In 2014, she became a three-year W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Leadership Fellow focusing on improving the media narrative about young people of color in the state and the U.S., culminating in the launch of the Mississippi Youth Media Project in summer 2016. She was also a Packard Future of Children Fellow, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice Fellow and received two Solutions Journalism Network grants to develop an award-winning “Preventing Violence” series of in-depth stories about young people and violence.