Don’t act like it ain’t been coming for a while.
This turned into a postcard for that esteemed icon of journalism, the peerless Donna Ladd. I don’t always agree with Donna (indeed, sometimes I vehemently disagree with her), but I will always take her side in a knife fight, because she’s got Jackson’s back, and because when everybody else was leaving, she did the unthinkable:
She came back to Mississippi.
And, she’s making a newspaper work—because it actually serves the community. The Jackson Free Press has news, kultur, laffs (we love that Jackson Breland loves Jabari Toins), and investigative powers beyond that of our Gannett-funded, and oft-furloughed, daily. Newspapers aren’t dying because of internets: newspapers are dying because they quit offering a value.
Don’t you think I’d buy the Ledger every day if it had huge page-sized offerings from Frank King and Winsor McKay? Why would you think I’d buy it if you lay off Orley Hood and keep Rick Cleveland and Gary Pettus and Sid Salter riding the bench a week at a time?
I shan’t; I shan’t.
AND LO, THE CLARION-LEDGER SHALL DIE COLD IN ITS SLEEP, ALONE AND UNLOVED.