Mapping Democracy: Fighting the Worthy Scrap Across Generations With Innovative Journalism7/22/2025  Mississippi Youth Media Project students visited the state Capitol close to their downtown newsroom at the Mississippi Free Press in 2023. In 2024, the young journalists are creating an Election Coverage Guide to help media cover their communities better. Photo by Imani Khayyam  Mississippi Free Press investigative reporter Nick Judin teaches 2023 Youth Media Project students tools for reporting, including how to easily transcribe their interviews. Photo courtesy Youth Media Project 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. 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.  Thanks to W.K. Kellogg Foundation support, early Mississippi Youth Media Project students started gathering daily during the summer on the 13th Floor of Capital Towers in downtown Jackson in 2016 to brainstorm their own story ideas together, then project-manage them to completion. In 2024, the summer YMP class is brainstorming with the Mississippi Free Press team on ways to improve election coverage in Mississippi and beyond. File Photo / Youth Media Project 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.  Civil-rights leader Bob Moses surrounded himself with young Mississippians in Jackson, Miss., for decades after he helped launch Freedom Summer in 1964. He taught generations algebra, deep thinking, to question and to become active and engaged members of society, working for the good of all. Donna Ladd was inspired by him to start the Mississippi Youth Media Project. Photo by David Rae Morris 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. 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.  On the afternoon of June 28, 2024, the full Mississippi Free Press and Youth Media Project teams joined forces to discuss how to better cover elections in Mississippi. They are following up with a story-planning training and workshop with MFP News Editor Ashton Pittman. Photo by Donna Ladd 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. 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.  At the June 28, 2024, MFP-YMP election solutions circle, student-mentor Paris Braggs of Callaway High School “passes” the talking stick to MFP Publisher Kimberly Griffin who was Zooming into the conversation from a journalism summit about media inclusion. Photo by Donna Ladd 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. 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.  As part of “Mapping Mississippi,” the Mississippi Free Press and the Youth Media Project are inviting community members, such as here in Biloxi, Miss., in April 2024 to participate in civic dialogues about issues they want solved in their communities. The team has added smaller pre-circle and post-circle think-tank meetups to facilitate the brainstorming of actions, as well as followup media coverage. Community members are helping brainstorm other ways to grow the conversations and the outcomes. Other media outlets are welcome to join. Photo by Acacia Clark 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. 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.  Mississippi Youth Media Project students interviewed now-Public Service Commissioner De’Keither Stamps at the state Capitol in summer 2023. Photo by Imani Khayyam See how this systemic journalism plan is starting to come together? It’s about connection, listening, and collaboration across divides, ages, everything.
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.
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