Donna Ladd
Donna Ladd is an investigative journalist who helped create The Jackson Free Press and The Colorado Springs Independent, two successful alternative weeklies. She is editor-in-chief and co-owner of The Jackson Free Press, the only member of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in Mississippi.
Ladd was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1961. The city is perhaps best known for the Neshoba County Fair, an annual event that is central to Mississippi's political life, and for white supremacist Edgar Ray Killen's 1964 murder of three young civil rights activists. In 1983, Ladd completed her B.A. in Political Science at Mississippi State University and left to pursue a career in journalism. She helped start The Colorado Springs Independent, Colorado's first alternative newsweekly, in 1993. After editing and writing for the paper for several years, she moved to New York where she became a writer for The Village Voice and pursued a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.
After graduating from the program in 2001, she returned to Mississippi after an 18-year absence and co-founded The Jackson Free Press, where she continues to serve as editor-in-chief and where she regularly contributes op-eds and investigative pieces. She took the name from the The Mississippi Free Press, a now-defunct investigative civil rights newspaper from the 1960s. The Jackson Free Press, which is free of charge and is supported entirely by advertising revenue, has a weekly circulation of 15,000 (though media audit figures suggest an actual readership of approximately 40,000) and its web site receives over 500,000 hits per month.
In 2006, Ladd and NAACP chapter president Derrick Johnson were co-recipients of the Friendship Award, an annual prize given by Jackson 2000, a racial reconciliation group. She has also been designated one of Mississippi's top 50 businesswomen by the Mississippi Business Journal, and has received numerous awards from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies for her journalism work.
Ladd lives in Jackson, Mississippi with her partner, author Todd Stauffer.
Papers Founded by Ladd
The Colorado Springs Independent