By Donna Ladd

Today is July 3, and I just said goodbye for a long weekend to a remarkable group of Youth Media Project students (age 15 to 17) from high schools throughout the Jackson metro and as far afield as Simpson Academy. Halfway through their six-week summer project in the Mississippi Free Press newsroom, they are enthusiastically calling person after person (including elected officials of both parties and at least one former governor) to talk about very serious issues while assembling their Election Coverage Guide this summer. 

In our newsroom full-time for six weeks (and paid), the students set their own benchmarks and are improving existing YMP systems. They are collaborative, they’re filing freedom-of-information requests, and one announced today that she’s going to write an explainer on Project 2025 because, you know, people need to know what’s in it. That’s my kind of newspaperwoman right there.

One of the YMP students, one of our fantastic high-performing students from last summer—some of whom we invite back to continue their work and help mentor new students—is creating an animated mural on one of our big white boards between calls and story work. She is clearly using it as thinking time, and I’m quite certain I will never want to erase that board.

I love it when a plan comes together. Or, even better, when it’s a dream—one of those big, hairy goals that many think will never happen. It’s too ambitious. It costs too much. And, you know, honey, that’ll take a lot of work. Yeah, I know. Let’s go.


Little Money and a Boatland of Sass
I’m an ideas person, and I like to start things others don’t expect to succeed as you may have noticed by now. I’ve always kept my doors, and my mind, wide open for inspiration, the more creative and audacious and, yeah, huge and hairy the better. I remember several very pivotal inspiration moments in the last quarter-century clearly just like it was earlier this morning. They might seem disparate at first glance, but stay with me.

At Columbia Journalism School in 2000—I was getting my master’s at almost 40—my adviser Andie Tucher nearly pushed me onto an airplane to come back to Mississippi and report on my home turf for the first time. I might’ve whined at first; I had run from this state never to return, Andie. Stop it. She didn’t. And so I did.

While here, I visited former (and perpetual) Secretary of State Dick Molpus from my hometown—except he didn’t exactly come of age in a trailer park as I had. I talked to him about the civil-rights murders in our town when I was 3 and he was a young teenager. And suddenly, I heard myself saying in his State Street office in Jackson: “Dick, you could have gone anywhere and done anything; why did you stay in Mississippi?”

“Well, Donna”—insert genteel southern drawl here—”I just decided I wanted to stay and fight the worthy scrap.” Something started churning inside me that never has stopped. Because, well, I suddenly wanted that, too.
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Back at Columbia, my mentor LynNell Hancock brought in a group of teenagers from the Bronx to talk about how miserably The New York Times and other media covered the city’s young people—especially kids of color. I immediately wrote about them for the Village Voice, back when it was still an important newspaper there. But it didn’t stop there.


​I was suddenly addicted to the idea that I wanted to train young not-usual-suspects to “be the media,” to explode myths, to change narratives, to use their experiences and knowledge to blow up what needed to be blown up through journalism. I even jokingly submitted a blurb to the little “Off the Record” yearbook for the j-school’s class of 2001 saying I expected, in 10 years, to be back in in the South teaching local people how to tell our real stories and history: “At some southern state university helping non-Ivy students, especially African Americans, figure out how to infiltrate the media elite.”

Well, that was prescient. I teach exactly that daily in a combination newsroom-classroom infused with understanding that it’s acceptable and necessary for even journalists in the South to challenge the status quo and power structures, including inside journalism. Some won’t like it, I tell them. Do it anyway.

When we moved to Jackson many Mississippi reporters were engaged in racist tort-reform coverage, using the political label “jackpot justice,” that would help turn Mississippi into a one-party state for decades to come (by design), per Mississippi politics experts Andy Taggart and Jere Nash in their seminal explainer book, “Mississippi Politics.” That’s called negative journalistic impact, and it’s what our systemic reporting uncovers and seeks to change. Even if some find it irksome.

We first opened our Free Press doors with barely any money to do something very different than that kind of gullible sensationalism 22 years ago on my late mother’s birthday, Sept. 22, 2002, with little money and a whole lot of sass. Over the next several years, we would hire and train people who are still with us to this day—including my partner in the Mississippi Free Press and national nonprofit journalism leader Kimberly Griffin.

Kvetching About Black Crime Without Context
​Not long into the JFP’s tenure, another big moment came. The great civil-rights hero Bob Moses, who was still teaching algebra then at Lanier High School, summoned me to the school. I had no idea why, but when Mr. Moses calls, you get in the damn car. In a classroom, I sat in a circle with him and Black teenagers who were devastated by the local corporate daily’s inaccurate coverage of them with a large front-page photo of a great teacher and Black teenage boy with headlines implying that he had failed tests when he was, in fact, a great student. His mother had bought every paper she could find in the neighborhood to shield him from public embarrassment.

The same corporate newspaper—originally one of the most openly racist dailies in the nation—that loved the fame of chasing old Klansmen was abysmal when it came to using good journalism to support young people right here in the capital city. And it was just as bad as the TV stations about kvetching about (Black) crime with no urgent context about why young people get caught in crime cycles or what might actually be done to prevent it, thereby feeding into the same kinds of political narratives that its one-sided tort-reform meltdown had created. Instead, it and other media decided, whine about one or another mayor—and demand more-more-more police, while being racist and not moving a damn needle at the same time.

Sitting in the Lanier High circle with the students and teachers, Mr. Moses wanted me to talk to his (brilliant) students about how media could be done differently—and that request from him is probably still the highest compliment I’ve ever received. So I did. I told them about the Bronx kids who exposed the Times’ propensity to represent young people who got in trouble differently and how they decided to be the media themselves. 

Out of that Lanier visit, a series of gatherings turned into early small versions of the Youth Media Project and helped ensure that so many young people from nearly all-Black public schools to white academies crossed our threshold and helped us think, grow and build a deep reader base. A group of students, including from Lanier, even produced a special print edition of the Jackson Free Press after they coded how local outlets were covering young people—down to using mugshots for accused Black kids and class portraits for white kids who got in trouble.

The after-effects of Mr. Moses calling for me birthed a dream I carried for years. What if Mississippi teenagers could have their own summer (and maybe even year-round, hint, hint) newsroom? Imagine if it could be full-time and paid them well and teach them to be innovative thinkers and doers? Of course at that point in the JFP’s growth, we were still struggling to increase the salaries of our amazing adult team, but I held onto this goal. I even reserved the URL youthmediaproject.com way back then, just as I had mississippifreepress.com reserved for two decades before the statewide MFP was born because big ideas propagate for me for a long time. (Watch for YMP home site update soon and and jxnpulse.com for new student journalism appearing in next few weeks.)

Then in 2014, a community mover-shaker recommended that I apply to be a W.K. Kellogg leadership fellow in Mississippi, and I immediately decided to pitch what I was already thinking of as “YMP” as my project. Thus, the first full-time summer newsroom opened in the suite of offices (formerly home of the MFP) next door to the JFP in Capital Towers in 2016 with the foundation’s support. The (paid) teenagers named and set up their own website, jxnpulse.com, and dove into what we now call collaborative “systemic journalism.”

A huge moment in my Kellogg fellowship journey was crawling around on a hotel convention ballroom floor in the Mississippi Delta with other fellows from across the state to do a systems analysis on education inequity in our state—the reasons for it and how to solve it. We used markers, sheets of paper and … pipe cleaners.
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That day the idea of expansive systemic reporting to show how inequities are developed and passed forward to form today’s realities was born for me. And the pipe-cleaner exercise is now one of my favorite workshop activities for both adult and teenage journalists, and our newsroom is partially papered with the outcomes. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation even had the first student systems analysis on youth crime turned into a poster we could roll up and use at a YMP alum talk at their 2020 convention here and other presentations.

Then in 2017, another pivotal moment happened for me. I was invited to attend a Solutions Journalism Network summit at Sundance in Utah. I was already sold on the solutions approach because I’d always believed that journalism should pursue and engage potential solutions (and thus more engaged audience) rather than fixating on problems or just catching bad guys without interrogating systems and holes that allowed the theft or errors—so we can close them to prevent future abuse.

But when I got there and encountered my first “un-conference” model of gathering instead of the usually horrid “expert”-panel-looking-down-from-a-stage approach, I was hooked—from the big initial circle of all of us to the smaller brainstorm circles to giving the attendees a chance on the spot to add a topic to the mix and lead a conversation.

I brought the idea back to YMP students, and they soon decided to host their own series of youth crime forums in school libraries and cafeterias around Jackson; I hadn’t yet named them “solutions circles,” but the idea for me was born in Utah. Yes, Jackson teenagers launched what we now call solutions-circle model of community engagement. Credit where it’s due.


Next Dream: Capitol Reporter
By the time Kimberly Griffin and I co-founded the nonprofit Mississippi Free Press in March 2020, all these ideas were beginning to root together in my head. Imagine a nonprofit, statewide, collaborative, racially inclusive 82-county newsroom focused on systems, historic causes, symptoms, inequities-to-solutions journalism, thus introducing an innovative approach to American journalism from right in the heart of the state so many brand as the worst of the worst? Talk about big, hairy, necessary.
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All of the interconnecting ideas and inspiration points started to gel for me and the team, and I came up with my latest name (I like to name things): “Mapping Mississippi.” Not only were we going to report on systems, causes and solutions; we also were going to build a new system of reporting on often-ignored communities. It would combine deep listening and engagement with continual solution circles and our systems-to-solutions on-the-ground reporting with the training and assistance of the young people of Mississippi. Big, hairy, possible.

This also means college students: My long-time next dream piece of the puzzle is to run a collaborative Capitol Reporter college-intern corps out of MFP’s downtown Jackson newsroom, a five-minute walk to the Capitol, to cover the state Legislature in a very different kind of way. This would result in far more actually local relevance on the 82-county homefront beyond the typical horse race and power obsession that comes to fruition every April from inside the Capitol. This will be far deeper than reporting for political junkies and partisans: It’s about the people together deciding how to move legislative needles moved on behalf of communities and residents due to, well, asking them what they need and how pending laws might affect them.

The name, by the way, is in homage to the late truth-teller Bill Minor whom I was lucky enough to get calls from for several years before we lost him. I value the times Mr. Minor allowed me to pick his brilliant brain; he is one of many who modeled actually fearless journalism to me, including about journalism.

I announced this Capitol Reporter training idea from the stage during a building-the-pipeline panel at a fantastic journalism summit at the University of Mississippi recently, the brainchild of its wonderful new journalism dean Andrea Hickerson sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation (which also supports the MFP), inviting other outlets to be involved in the planning and execution. The summit was two non-stop and packed days of journalism leaders from newsrooms and colleges putting old-school competition aside to eagerly participate in brainstorm sessions and chatty receptions. It was far from the exclusive invitation-only meetups at some journalism events that can create a weird and harmful industry caste vibe. Personally, I prefer to leave the velvet-rope game to my 1980s club days back at the Palladium and Limelight in New York.


Andrea created the kind of event that can lead to real collaboration among the willing, and I applaud her for doing something in Mississippi no other journalism leader had bothered to try. Press Forward leader Dale Anglin and Jim Brady of the Knight Foundation were there to inspire and urge us all to figure out how to work together.
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Be clear: We don’t want to go this alone, and it would be arrogant and silly to try. Our state needs a healthy journalism ecosystem blanketing Mississippi with high standards, real dialogue and more belief in our state’s potential, which journalism leaders who fully participated in those two days in Oxford want to do. If you can help in whatever way—like resources or ideas for spring housing for Mississippi interns in Jackson—reach out. 

Meantime, back here in Jackson, we held a joint solutions circle between the full MFP and YMP staffs last week with both publications planning a new kind of election coverage by brainstorming and deep listening together.
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The night before, MFP and YMP team members had come together with community members for pizza in our newsroom and an innovative brainstorm session (live plus Zoom) on better election coverage with paired conversations and then discussion of what could be (a) reported, (b) go to a larger solutions circle for more discussion and/or (c) “other” use or followup.

To come full circle, 2016 YMP student Ryan Perry (Northwest Rankin) developed this brainstorm model—and is one of our circles co-leads with Hart Jefferson, a 2024 graduate of Murrah High School who trained new YMP students on circling this summer. The circles team is fixated on how to translate these conversations into actions, tools and better media coverage. It’s not just enough to talk and leave. Stay tuned and sign up to get involved—and thank you to both the American Press Institute and the Knight Foundation for supporting the circles this year.

See how this systemic journalism plan is starting to come together? It’s about connection, listening, and collaboration across divides, ages, everything.
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There is yet another core piece to our interconnecting plan that I will save for another day. (Yes, my eyes are twinkling.) But suffice it to say that the goal that Kimberly, the team and I have for Mississippi journalism is not about owning or controlling journalism, being the only, the biggest, the whatever ego thing. We are here to bring as many people as we can under a healthy interconnected tent focused far past ego and fully on helping our state and all its people reach our greatest potential together. In our shop, our expertise is systemic journalism, education in and outside the newsroom, and inclusive pipeline development and how they can fit together to achieve impactful results.

That is the reason we named our nonprofit the Mississippi Journalism and Education Group. We’re not in this only for ourselves. Join us, and let’s lead with innovation and the spirit of new ideas, hope and rolling up our damn sleeves for our state, our nation and true democracy.

To support the work of the Mississippi Journalism and Education Group, please give at mfp.ms/donate. If you prefer your donation be targeted to the Youth Media Project, please include a note on your donation form.

by Kimberly Griffin

I’ll be honest: It’s been a rough few weeks. Let’s face it. It’s been a bumpy ride for most of us since 2020. What’s the saying? I’m tired of living in unprecedented times. I’m generally an optimist, more of a pragmatic optimist but an optimist all the same. That’s been tough this season. Before all the election turmoil, though, the Youth Media Project—one of the three newsrooms under our nonprofit, the Mississippi Journalism and Education Group umbrella (the Jackson Free Press is the third and isn’t active right now)—published some remarkable work. The YMP is a newsroom in the capital area run by teenagers that convenes each summer. It is typically focused on one issue, with this year’s young journalists deciding to focus on voting and elections. 

You can check out the YMP Flipbook here. Like much of the United States, many young journalists weren’t particularly interested in our recent election, not because of apathy but because we aren’t meeting them where they are. It’s easy for folks like me who live and breathe current events and politics to assume high school and college-aged folks are engaging with information in the same way, with access to the same algorithms or the same outstanding civic education I had from my public school. The fact isn’t that they are apathetic. They do care, as YMP revealed.

As the introduction to the project said, “The students at YMP are trying to do what they can to change election coverage for young voters—and not just those who are voting this year. Even though most of the YMP students are not yet old enough to vote, they understand that the people who get elected have the power to make major changes in the daily lives of citizens. They also now fully realize how important it is to create a pipeline of future voters sooner than later and (that) even if they’re not old enough to vote yet, they may inspire their family members to turn out.”

I saw U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor at the Mississippi Book Festival a few years ago. She said one of the most significant causes of division was the removal of civics from classrooms nationwide. Starting in middle school, I took a class that focused on government and how it worked. We had mock elections when I was at Chastain, and I remember the simple and catchy song that ran most of my childhood as part of the “School House Rock!” Saturday morning broadcast, which included the timeless “I’m Just a Bill” song. I still sing that little ditty today, albeit badly, to remind myself how legislation works. 

Media partisanship is another issue that rose to the top of YMP reporting. The number of newsrooms that are arms of one political faction or another is startling. These young people know it, and they don’t like it. “Lots of news that I read and watch is favoring one side over the other,” second-year YMP student mentor Laila Henderson said. “Many people are looking for the whole story to be told and without always being divided into two opposing sides, which helps readers and watchers make decisions on their own.”
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We want to tell the “whole story”—not only during an election session but also afterward when we consider the consequences of our choices. I encourage you to reach out to this incredible body of work from our YMP newsroom as they help us reimagine how to cover elections, promote civic engagement and give critical information to our team. 

by Kiden-Aloyse Smith

I started with the Mississippi Journalism and Education Group, specifically the Mississippi Free Press, during my senior year at Jackson State University. I learned about the Poynter and Google News Initiative only a couple days before the application was due and decided to apply at a whim. I didn’t know much about MJEG, but I figured it would be good to get ahead by finding a solid internship to fulfill my internship credits. 

I didn’t know that the extent of my fall internship would bring forth the opportunity to create and share raw and distinct stories like MFP does. 

While serving as the team’s misinformation fellow, I spent time focused on election-based fact-checking, particularly while the governor’s race was ongoing. I gained my fair share of experience learning the dangers of horse-race reporting and how to go about handling false information. 

Following graduation, I became the editorial programming coordinator with the Youth Media Project, which left me with many gems that I figured is good information any journalist should know. 
Knowledge is power. And real journalism tells real stories. 

Spending my summer mentoring 14-to-17-year-olds on the world of objectivity (and coming to the conclusion that it sometimes does more harm than good) and how to write meaningful and engaging stories re-ignited why I fell in love with writing and journalism. 


Now, as MFP’s editorial assistant, editing and coordinating stories for Voices, and also as the special projects coordinator for our most engaging community initiatives and programs such as YMP and our Solution Circles, I see even more clearly why the stories of local Misssissippians are so important. 


Being from St. Louis, Mo., my experiences have helped me understand the significance of covering marginalized voices in every space, from politics to the environment. And with my great aunts, uncles and grandmother leaving Tutwiler, Miss., during the Great Migration to go places like St. Louis or Chicago, the importance of history and storytelling has always been a central theme in my life. 


Going to an HBCU like Jackson State University empowered me as a young Black woman journalist to seek out truths and to go where the untold stories are. I can honestly say within my short period working at MFP that the mission of this newsroom is to do just that.


This is so important, especially in the state of Mississippi, which is consistently left out of conversations, yet decidedly affected by national and local policies and decisions. 


Although YMP has come to a close, I look forward to sharing the “Election Summer” flipbook the amazing students made and showcasing their stories, most of which have already been published on JXNpulse.com. 


I think what we can all learn from our young people is that there is power in our voices and that the choices we make are never just about us, especially when it comes to voting. 


Stay tuned to our upcoming Solution Circles that bridge Mississippians together to discuss pertinent issues in the state, such as infrastructure or education. 


While the worlds of politics and journalism are forever changing, the Mississippi Free Press will continue to share authentic and engaging stories for and from our readers. 

We are currently accepting applications for the Youth Media Project Summer 2018 program! Are you in the capital city and interested in applying or know a young person between the ages of 14-18 who are interested? Apply online today! Applications are due Friday, May 18, and must be completed by interested student applicants.

At the end of the program, students leave with soft skills such as collaboration, time management, leadership, critical thinking and problem solving; stronger oral and written communication; a professional resume; networking contacts; a knowledge of potential job options; opportunities for future intern- and apprenticeships; and technical skills in information technology application. 

​Questions? Let us know! You can email [email protected]. 

Youth Media Project Summer 2018 Application 

First, a thank you for those of you who generously supported the YMP Fall Showcase at the Capital Club on Nov. 16. Many of the summer 2017 students attended with their families, guests and sponsors; enjoyed wonderful food and beautiful city views; and screened their documentaries and read from their powerful work. (All work available at jxnpulse.com.) We appreciate you so much for helping young people create powerful, honest stories about their communities.
 
Please include the Youth Media Project in your year-end giving to help YMP have space and resources to continue producing year-rounddocumentaries on their education needs and Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba’s first year, as well as produce a series of crime-prevention neighborhood dialogues to build on their crime-prevention journalism to date leading up to a big YMP Youth Crime Summit in late spring. And please come visit the YMP learning space in Capital Towers when you get a chance. Write [email protected] to schedule a time.
 
In fact, here are 10 ways you can help the Mississippi Youth Media Project grow and keep producing vital solutions-focused media to help improve both the narrative about young people in Mississippi, as well as empower and inspire the community to engage in these solutions together:

1. Include the Youth Media Project in your holiday and year-end giving. You can make a tax-deductible contribution directly here or mail a check made out to our fiscal sponsor, Dialogue Jackson, to Youth Media Project, 125 S. Congress St., Suite 1330, Jackson, MS 39201. And please share and encourage others to donate to YMP as well.
   
   
2. Tell everyone you know about the project. And especially ask them to read student work at jxnpulse.com and more about the project at youthmediaproject.com.youthmediaproject.com. 
   
   
3. Share, share, share their student work on your social media accounts.
   
   
4. Go comment under the stories to encourage the team!
   
   
5. Tell us about grant and other funding opportunities you can suggest. (And thanks to those who have already!) Write [email protected].
   
   
6. Encourage other teenagers, age 14 to 18, to write [email protected] to get involved.
   
   
7. Suggest story ideas and opportunities to [email protected].
   
   
8. Get in touch about volunteering, including to help with the YMP Youth Crime Summit in 2018.
   Write [email protected].
   
   
9. Suggest collaboration opportunities for YMP. We love to work with other groups (adults or youth) with similar goals. Help us network! Write [email protected] with ideas.
   
   
10. Ask YMP students to speak to your organization or company about what we do. Write [email protected] to arrange a visit.
    
    Thank you for your support!

Accompanied by six current students, I spoke to the Rotary Club of Jackson about the project on July 17, 2017. I focused my speech on YMP's effort to help lead a community-wide effort to reduce youth crime. Here is my speech in its entirety:
 
Good afternoon, Rotarians, and thank you so much to Neddie Winters for getting me here today. I’m thrilled to be with you to talk about the Mississippi Youth Media Project. I’ve brought a few of this summer’s 29 students with me today: meet Leslyn Smith of Callaway High School; Maggie Jefferis, Chloe Bishop, Sonni Presley and Jeffrey Caliedo of Murrah; and Maisie Brown of Jim Hill.
 
I’m also thrilled to see the director of the Mississippi FBI here as well. Special Agent in Charge Christopher Freeze just came from the Youth Media Project where Leslyn and her crime-prevention team interviewed him for their YMP Youth Crime Lab project. He is also the reason I’m here to talk to you about YMP today, as well as the need to provide other opportunities for young people that, in turn, will lower crime in our community.

After Donna gave her YMP presentation at 1 Million Cups, the teens and other participants took over for a Q&A session and discussion of the project so far.

Donna gave a presentation on July 6, 2016 at the Coalesce co-working center in downtown Jackson for the weekly 1 Million Cups meeting. Her "startup" pitch was Youth Media Project—telling the history, the goals, principles and asking for a little help from the audience.

?by Lynne Schneider
YMP Program Manager,
Murrah High School English, Journalism Teacher

​Teachers love to teach (most of them). Except in the summer. So what is a teacher doing spending all her summer weekdays in an office in downtown Jackson? With a group of teenagers?! 

That’s what I thought, too, when the alarm went off at 6:45 a.m. on June 1. It was the first day of June, and while my family kept on snoring, I started the morning commute to Capital Towers in downtown Jackson. And I wondered what the heck I was doing ... I adore the lazy days of summer. Now, three weeks into the Youth Media Project, I am no longer questioning why I’m here. The students are talented, and they want to be here. They REALLY want to be here. They get a writing assignment or another task assigned, and they do it, every time. And have I mentioned that the office is bright and open, and includes an amazing view of Jackson down below us?

But’s it not just that I’m in a fabulous space and working with the best teenagers in the tri-county area. As a teacher, I know what authentic learning looks like. And authentic learning happens every day in the YMP office. I could list all the Common Core Standards (or College and Career Standards, which is the same thing) that our lessons and the student work include, but it is summer. So let me just tell you that these students are researching every day. They write, and edit, and rewrite, and then edit some more. And then write the next story or blog and start the cycle again.