Media Matters: OFP is 2 years old!

The Oxford Free Press celebrates its second anniversary this coming week. We launched our first weekly print edition on July 12, 2024. 

Six months earlier, shortly after Cox Media shut down its weekly Oxford Press, Jim Rubenstein, John Skillings and I met and decided to start a nonprofit weekly print newspaper. We strongly believed we lived in a place that would support a nonprofit paper. We also knew what happens in towns without reporters covering public institutions, letting us know what’s happening and what's important. People drift to other places – to talk radio, to cable programs, to social media – where very little journalism happens. Partisanship flourishes in places without local reporting. 

So in the spring of 2024, we hired our founding editor – Sean Scott, the award-winning editor of The Miami Student. Six months later, the Oxford Kiwanis Club named us “Organization of the Year.”  

Regionally, the OFP won two Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) awards in 2025 and was a finalist in several categories at the Greater Cincinnati annual awards ceremony. Sean won first place awards for his beat reporting on housing problems and another in the government issues category: “Parkview Arms under scrutiny after sending eviction notices to residents."

Statewide this past March, under the leadership of our current editor, Aidan Cornue, the Ohio News Media Association (ONMA) named the Oxford Free Press “Newspaper of the Year” in the small newspaper category. We took home several other ONMA honors, including first place awards for in-depth reporting and for original columns. In addition, our talented web and page designer, Miami University alumna Macey Chamberlin, won four first place awards for ad design, newspaper layout, in-house ad, and best special edition design.  

At the national level, the Columbia Journalism Review profiled the Oxford Free Press last February in an article titled “Where Print is King.”  The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) named us as one of three finalists for “Startup of the Year” in both 2025 and 2026. Last year, the prestigious Report for America organization named the OFP as one of 35 newspapers in its pilot accelerator program, which aids newspapers with their sustainability efforts. This year, INN’s Rural News Network chose us as one of six nonprofits RNN would support to increase and improve our coverage of education issues facing our town and rural districts.   

Most of our success is due to the high standards set by our founding editor and our current editor. Together they have produced nearly 100 Friday print editions while keeping our website current each day. Amazingly, both Sean and Aidan came to us right out of college – Sean from Miami University and Aidan from West Virginia University. 

Since our founding, we have raised $345,000, including $235,000 from 500 individual donors, around $50,000 in external grants, and $60,000 from advertising.   

We owe much of our early successes to our community and donors for their sustained support. Our donations and matching grants allowed us to hire a new reporter, Katelyn Aluise, aided by $22,000 from INN’s NewsMatch contest. Coming to us from The Herald-Dispatch in Huntington,WV, Katelyn has helped us do a much better job covering both our town and our rural townships. 

Last summer, we were also able to hire a part-time business manager, Ginny Reynolds, whose efforts and energy substantially boosted our ad revenue. A key member of our team, Ginny also manages our donor lists, coordinates our community events, and supervises the sales of our OFP merchandise, like the t-shirts and hats we sold at Oxford’s Bee Festival.    

We have received significant grants from the Greater Oxford Community Foundation and Miami’s Menard Family Center for Democracy. Miami’s Advancing State Priorities, Igniting Regional Economies (ASPIRE) office, under the direction of Randi Thomas, has provided office space in the Lee and Rosemary Fisher Innovation College@Elm Center – and Lee writes an occasional column for the OFP about our local veterans. Under the leadership of Rosemary Pennington and Joe Sampson, Miami’s journalism program provides four interns (two per semester) who are funded through scholarships from the Menard Center and the Oxford Community Foundation.

Because of the generosity of our donors, we have also hired two Miami student interns over the past two summers. This summer, the editor of The Miami Student, Shannon Mahoney, is working as a reporter for the OFP.  We were also able to hire Miami alumna Alison Perelman part-time to manage our social media presence and our outreach to younger readers. 

Our donor backbone remains Oxford’s large retirement community, whose members often tell us how much they appreciate the Friday print edition in addition to our digital presence. Before INN’s NewsMatch competition last fall, we hosted a “thank you” and fund drive at The Knolls of Oxford retirement community. We now print 1,900 copies each week (up from 1,500), delivered by our faithful volunteers, under the watchful direction of Bobbe Burke, to more than 50 drop-off locations. To sustain our momentum and successes, we will need the continued support of our community and Miami University. Our editor would like to hire a full-time sports reporter and find ways to better serve our outlying townships through our partnership with the Rural News Network. It will take additional grants and donations to sustain the Oxford Free Press. 

Margaret Sullivan calls on us in her 2020 book, “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy" to “energetically support and foster the new models [like the Oxford Free Press] that are forging the local journalism so necessary for today and tomorrow.”

Every community has good stories to tell, and we need good reporters who can tell them.

Richard Campbell is a professor emeritus and founding chair of the Department of Media, Journalism & Film at Miami University. He is a co-founder of the Oxford Free Press.