Jackson Free Press

May marked the first full year of the Jackson Free Press as a weekly publication, a feat that we were excited to dive into last summer and, now more than 50 issues later, we're very glad that we did.

This past year has meant remarkable growth for us as a publication, and publishing weekly has given us the opportunity and space to grow what we do well. In the "front" of each issue, that means the coverage of local and state political coverage that I hope you're coming to expect from the JFP, including our Talk of Jackson section and our hard-hitting cover stories.

How good are those stories? This month we learned that the Jackson Free Press will be receiving two awards from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (http://www.aan.org) for our front-of-the-book coverage. Ayana Taylor, Tougaloo '04, and a graduate of the Institute for Alternative Journalism at Northwestern University, has placed in Short Form News Feature.

Donna Ladd, editor of the Jackson Free Press, has placed in the Feature Writing category for her story "Alleged Victims: Jackson Family Wants Closure From the Church" published one year ago this week. This award will be Donna's third—a remarkable accomplishment in our two years of eligibility—when added to the awards she received for opinion writing and music criticism last year.

In the "back" of each issue, weekly publication lets us bring you the best arts and entertainment coverage in town. From film to music to food to stage to wine and our picks for an enjoyable week—our goal is to serve as an invitation to our readers to enjoy an overwhelming diversity of events that take place in the Jackson Metro area each week. Indeed ... we had to go weekly just to cover it all.

But how good is our entertainment coverage? Our third AAN writing award this year will be given to Jesse Yancy for his exceptional contribution as a food columnist. Jesse is already the JFP's most syndicated columnist, with his food stories being sold to newspapers in towns from Memphis to Albuquerque, N.M. Add to Jesse's work the exceptional wine columns by sommelier Leslie Tolar McHardy, who joined the JFP family this year, food news by Lynette Hanson and food humor by Andrew Scott—and you've got the best culinary coverage in town and the section is growing.

There's plenty more talent where that came from—the music columns, reviews, Band in a Box features and listings by Herman Snell, the book section now coordinated by bibliophile Lynette Hanson and the music contributions by a team of freelancers from Skyla Dawn Luckey to Eric Stracener to Alphonso Mayfield—I'm extremely proud of the tireless entertainment team we've put together. And Othor Cain's new gospel column is already a must-read.

On the news side, Assistant Editor Casey Parks has graduated Millsaps and will be full time with us until she takes a teaching sabbatical to France this fall—we hope and expect to get her back, as her full-time efforts get everyone home at a decent hour on Monday "press nights."

The addition of Adam Lynch as a staff reporter is a big part of why you can grab the JFP every week and learn something you probably didn't know about city and state politics—we've wanted Adam on our staff for a long time because he's an old-school nose-to-the-grindstone reporter, and we're thrilled that he's finally a fixture on our masthead.

If you've noticed the persistent evolution of our design, you'll see the influence of our full-time staff designer, Jakob Clark, working in concert with art director Jimmy Mumford in an effort to constantly make the paper more readable and, at the same time, more dense with enlightening and entertaining coverage.

None of this would be possible without Stephen Barnette, our advertising director, who oversees the entire advertising operation as well as advertising design and the final get-it-to-the-printer production steps.

In other news, we're once again expanding our reach with a new round of high-capacity indoor/outdoor wire racks emblazoned with our name and logo writ large; if you know of a good location where you don't currently get the JFP, please write me.

Also, over the next few weeks we'll roll out a new Web-based system for placing and reading classified ads—ads will now be easily ordered online via http://www.jacksonfreepress.com as well as by calling us at 601.362.6121 x1. And those ads will now be displayed and searchable on our Web site for the duration of their paid run.

Speaking of our Web site, in the past three months our traffic has averaged more than 275,000 page views per month, driven by the conversations that occur online within our community-focused blogs and forums. During the "Year of Going Weekly," we've found the JFP extended out into a daily publication on the Web, as we're able to discuss the news as it happens and offer a daily look at what to do in the Jackson Metro for dining and entertainment.

As always, our writers and editors remain dedicated to telling the truth in their stories. We want you, as readers, to be proud of the work we do and the way we represent Jackson. So, we've stuck to our ethical guns—we don't sell stories or endorsements, we don't run "advertorial," and we don't ever have to report back to the home office in Virginia—we started on a kitchen table with some crazy folks and an idea that Jackson could benefit from independent media voices. Then we went about the hard work of making it successful as a business.

Sure, ours is a 21st-century approach—free distribution, blogs, e-mail newsletters and video games reviews—but it's a tradition as old as the Enlightenment principles upon which this nation's free press was based, as rich as the traditions of the American press from the 18th century on and as fun-filled as the exploits of my writerly hero, Mark Twain, and the "newspaperman" tradition he represents.

Here's to another year of informing and entertaining you, weekly on the newsstands and daily on our Web site. We hope you're having as much fun as we are.