They took the name from The Mississippi Free Press, a now-defunct investigative civil rights newspaper from the 1960s.
The most recent Media Audit figures indicate an actual readership of approximately 50,000, and its active Web site, which launched on a blogging platform in 2002, receives more than 500,000 page views per month.
[1][2][3] Stauffer became president of a new alliance to counter Gannett's efforts, called the Mississippi Independent Publisher's Association.
Editor & Publisher magazine interviewed Stauffer about his efforts and wrote an editorial calling for Gannett to "halt" the TDN distribution scheme, which E&P called a violation of "the First Amendment right to distribute papers without unreasonable interference.
[5] Stauffer wrote one of the earliest books on blogging and is now a national consultant for publications seeking to transition to the Internet, speaking at national and state newspaper gatherings, from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies to the New York Press Association.