As the journalism industry continues to lose advertising revenue and readership to internet platforms, many editors and writers find themselves having to hustle not only to cover local news but to pay the bills. Turning to philanthropy to sustain their operations, these journalists are learning how to fundraise.
It’s not something that comes naturally to many journalists, said Kimberly Griffin, publisher and chief revenue officer at the nonprofit Mississippi Free Press. Griffin is a fundraiser for the Free Press, which is considered a bright spot within an otherwise imperiled media world that has seen thousands of newspapers disappear over the past 20 years. Newspapers lost an estimated 75 percent of advertising revenue since 2000, according to data from the Pew Research Center. They also lost readership to Google, Facebook, and other media platforms, as well as to online influencers, most of whom aren’t trained journalists and some of whom have helped to spread misinformation.
Mississippi Free Press, on the other hand, has been gaining readers and recognition by working to correct misinformation and reporting on both barriers and solutions to systemic issues like racism and poverty. And it’s done it all while winning big grants from regional and national funders.
“Everybody in media needs to be fundraising,” Griffin told an audience at the Journalism and Women Symposium’s annual conference in New Orleans this fall.
“Why? Because it takes an hour for me to ask for $10,000, and it takes an hour for me to ask for a $1,000 ad contract,” she said. “It’s the same hour.”
Griffin, who was previously associate publisher of the for-profit Jackson Free Press, co-founded MFP in 2020 with former Jackson Free Press editor-in-chief Donna Ladd. Griffin said she initially found the prospect of asking people for money terrifying. Now, she wants to help other journalism organizations understand that they can ask their communities to invest in them whether they are nonprofit or not. And they should start by tapping wealthy individuals for funds, she said.
“There’s no community that doesn’t have rich people,” she said. “We live in a capitalistic society. Go find the rich people.”
Mississippi Free Press has done that. After launching in 2020 with a $50,000 donation and one full-time reporter, the outlet has racked up major gifts and grown to a staff of 18. W.K. Kellogg Foundation has been one of its largest funders, providing more than $500,000 total, Ladd said. In 2023, MFP received $350,000 from the MacArthur Foundation. This year, it got $150,000 from the Ford Foundation.
The news nonprofit has also raised money from local community members and regional funders like Karen Radosevich and her husband, Jim Schott, a former Entergy Corporation vice president and adjunct faculty member at Loyola University. Between 2020 and 2023, Mississippi Free Press said it raised $1.6 million total in individual donations, with $752,023 of that from Mississippians alone. It has received funds from 3,315 individual donors. (The MacArthur and Ford Foundations are financial supporters of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)
At the Journalism and Women Symposium event, Griffin told a fundraising anecdote about approaching a couple who previously gave $10,000 a year. She aimed high, asking for $30,000 a year, and ultimately boosted their giving to give $15,000 a year.
“The bigger you ask, the more money you will get,” Griffin said.
Griffin also advised the room full of reporters and editors from for- and nonprofit newsrooms to attend professional conferences, identify the philanthropic sponsors, and schedule meetings with foundation program officers while there.
“They have a job and their job is to talk to you. They have to give away the money,” she said. " If you don’t talk to them, they don’t know they’re supposed to give you the money.”
Reporting for a Diverse Audience
Four years ago, Griffin, Ladd, and Ashton Pittman, the Mississippi Free Press’s first reporter and its current news editor, set out to create something that they felt was missing: A diverse newsroom that covered state news, including rural communities.
All three journalists had come from the Jackson Free Press, which Ladd co-founded in 2002 after graduating from Columbia Journalism School. She returned home with the goal of launching a publication that would focus on Jackson and issues often not covered, such as white supremacy, racial violence, and systemic inequity.
At that time, the media was very segregated in Jackson, with newspapers and TV stations that drew either mostly white or mostly Black audiences, she said.
“We wanted to talk to everybody and really do the kinds of historically-informed, honest reporting that was talking about systems rather than buying into the crime obsessions that fed racism,” she said.
“Jackson Free Press was rejecting that kind of coverage and going deeply into the history of segregation and race violence and terrorism that had caused white flight and led things to being the way that they were,” she added. “As a result of that, we really attracted very fast a very inclusive audience.”
For most of its two-decade run, Jackson Free Press was financially stable. However, Ladd suspected it would only be a matter of time before it, too, would be impacted by the downturns that had overtaken so many other local news sources.
In 2018, while Ladd was recovering from breast cancer, she began mulling the idea of taking her newsroom nonprofit.
“I had time to think, and I knew that the downfalls of the industry were catching up with us,” she said. “We had done so much at the Jackson Free Press with our reporting. I just didn’t want to let that go away.”
Ladd had long wanted to create a statewide publication and had already reserved the URL for the Mississippi Free Press, which was originally the name of a weekly newspaper started by slain Civil Rights movement icon Medgar Evers and an interracial team of activists in the early 1960s. It’s hard to sustain a statewide publication on ad revenue alone, Ladd noted. Yet the idea of establishing it as a nonprofit was frightening, she said.
“I really didn’t want to do a start-up again. And I was really afraid of raising money. I just did not want to do that.”
She changed her mind while attending a writer’s workshop in upstate New York in 2019. While there, Ladd said she “crashed” a gathering for nonprofit media professionals. She sat around a fire pit with some attendees who convinced her that starting a nonprofit wouldn’t be so daunting. Ladd already had the experience of running a business, she had a built-in audience with readers from the Jackson Free Press, and her nonprofit newsroom would be among very few in the state, they said.
“It was like a light bulb going off,” she said.
When Ladd returned from the workshop, she took Griffin out to lunch and asked if she would like to partner to start Mississippi Free Press. Griffin agreed to come on board, and the two hatched a plan to start the publication in the spring of 2020, just as Covid hit.
Pittman wrote the majority of Mississippi Free Press’ early stories about the state’s pandemic response, which was ranked among the country’s worst in a report from the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit that focuses on health care. The publication’s pandemic coverage included stories about the state’s high hospitalization rates and Governor Tate Reeves’ opposition to reissuing a statewide mask mandate in the fall of 2020.
Those stories helped Mississippi Free Press gain national attention and attract funders from outside the state, Griffin said.
Mississippi Free Press has differentiated itself from more traditional local news services by exploring the root causes and potential remedies for systemic issues affecting communities, rather than trying to cover every city council or school board meeting, Griffin said. Last year, it published a multi-part investigation of racism at the University of Mississippi.
“We do cover some daily news that’s important to the state, and we do cover our legislature, but our focus is looking at systemic issues around the state,” she said.
Since its founding, the news organization has grown to six reporters, seven editors, and a team of freelance journalists reporting on Mississippi’s 82 counties. The majority of staff are women, people of color, or members of other marginalized communities. Most came from the Jackson Free Press, which has since been acquired by nonprofit Mississippi Journalism, and Education Group, which also owns the Mississippi Free Press and the Mississippi Youth Media Project.
MFP said it has an average monthly readership of 122,800. Its 25,170 email, text and online subscribers include Mississippians, former residents of the state, and other national readers. Mississippi Free Press also is making efforts to reach more rural communities and last summer launched a text news service in collaboration with the Institute of Nonprofit News Network’s Text RURAL, which has resulted in 500 new subscribers.
“We believe that our dedication to inclusion in staffing, readership, and coverage are core to long-term longevity,” Ladd said.
Mississippi Free Press is aiming to grow its team to 10 reporters by 2026 and add another three reporters the following year. It is part of the organization’s plan to expand its coverage, as well as the reach of initiatives such as “solutions circles,” a series of meetings where community members discuss issues like equitable housing and offer suggestions for how they could be better reported on. The Press has also created beats such as education equity, environment, and Indigenous affairs, with the aim of better covering issues that affect diverse communities throughout the state.
The Press has begun to focus on serving its audience under the incoming Trump administration, which reporters suggest could affect oversight of the Jackson water system, Mississippi’s LGBTQ+ community, and access to affordable housing. In the lead up to the election, Mississippi Free Press wrote about flaws in a state-run election polling place locator tool that resulted in some voters going to the wrong place on Election Day.
“We have never shied away from being biased toward the truth, and our loyal audience knows it,” Ladd said. “Our fact-checks, plus additional and historic context model, is key to who we are and how we’re different.”
Philanthropy Magnets and News Deserts
Despite consistently ranking among the poorest states, Mississippi has been fertile ground for nonprofit news start-ups, largely due to its legacy of attracting philanthropy dollars. Mississippi Today, a nonprofit newsroom established ahead of Mississippi Free Press in 2016, is now one of the state’s largest newsrooms. One of its reporters recently won a Pulitzer Prize for her investigation of a welfare fraud scandal.
Mississippi may have a unique edge that will be hard for nonprofit local newsrooms to match, given the state’s long history of receiving significant shares of philanthropy dollars because of its high poverty rates, said Richard Tofel, who operates Gallatin Advisory, a journalism consultancy,. He previously was president of ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news organization.
While there may not be a huge number of major donors within Mississippi, the state has been the focus of a lot of philanthropic funding since President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society poverty reduction programs, Tofel said. So has West Virginia, another of the poorest states, he added. Tofel noted that Mountain State Spotlight, a West Virginia nonprofit news outlet, like Mississippi Free Press, also launched amid the pandemic in 2020 and also writes about “abuses of power” and injustice. It has received multiple grants from the Ford Foundation totaling $575,000.
For local news outlets in other states that have received one-time grants from Press Forward, a $500 million effort to bolster the news industry, and other funders, fundraising could be more challenging, Tofel said.
“I worry more about a place like South Dakota, which is a relatively poor state where there is not this national tradition of sending money,” he said. “It is not reasonable, I think, to expect that you will be able to permanently and repeatedly import philanthropic funds into poor places in the country, generally speaking.”
The crisis facing local news outlets is “snowballing,” with the number of news deserts — regions with limited or no access to local news sources — increasing, Tim Franklin, head of the Local News Initiative, said during a recent briefing. However, there also has been an increase in digital, local news sites, which is reason for hope, Franklin said. That has been boosted by philanthropy and specifically Press Forward, which recently awarded $100,000 grants to 205 local news outlets.
Franklin also noted that there aren’t enough philanthropic dollars to replenish all of the country’s news deserts.
“So, I think what we’re going to see is a mixture of solutions across the country, a mixture of nonprofit and for-profits,” he said.
“I think it needs to be a combination of the two.”