The Saturday Press was a newspaper published in Minnesota and edited by Jay Near in the 1920s. After running a series of articles criticizing police and city officials in Minneapolis, the paper faced an onslaught of legal woes, including restraining orders and demanding vendors to stop selling the papers. At the time, this extreme censorship was enforceable under a state statute that allowed government officials to treat a “malicious, scandalous, defamatory newspaper” as a public nuisance and forbid its publication. Undeterred, the newspaper appealed its case all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1931, the Court ruled to allow the newspaper to continue publishing, concluding it could not be censored before publication and thus making prior restraint illegal across the nation. This precedent case established a pattern that the Supreme Court has followed ever since.
Importance of Near v. Minnesota, 1931
A message from our Founder, Alexandria Bordas:
“Journalism is a trade — one of passion and justice, that can only stay alive through educating and mentoring the next generation of storytellers. With increasingly limited opportunities to acquire the tools necessary to be a skilled journalist, my goal is to create independent learning opportunities for students and provide a platform for them to publish stories about their school campuses and local communities.
Prior Restraint Media was born out of passion and a desire to support investigative reporters in pursuing, reporting and publishing stories that hold the powerful to account. There are dwindling opportunities to publish large-scale stories outside of coveted Investigative Teams or partnering with elite, reputable news organizations, which prioritize in-house reporters. Investigative reporting openings are shrinking, as most newsrooms can no longer afford to lose a reporter for a sustained period of time. With journalists being forced to endure the 24-hour news cycle, time is beyond limited — which does not bode well for the future of investigative journalism. This was the driving factor behind my founding of Prior Restraint Media: how many other critical investigative stories are sitting untold and may never be published?
By training reporters at a younger age, they will be more prepared to pursue high-level investigative stories earlier in their careers. There is a bottomless well of important stories waiting to be told — are you ready?”