Just an eye blink ago we were a newborn, a startup operating out of an actual broom closet, a nonprofit newsroom that to this co-founder felt more fantastic daydream than reality.
Today I’m writing this from my office inside our Omaha headquarters, which covers most of one floor of an office building. It’s one of our three offices. We’re also in Lincoln and Kearney.
On the other side of my half-open door I can hear the voices of reporters and editors chatting, laughing, scheming story ideas, committing various acts of journalism.
Some of the voices belong to younger journalists from all over — Atlanta, Houston, China via North Carolina, Chicago via North Dakota, Colorado, Michigan, Tennessee — who have brought their ample talents to my home state as they have become Nebraskans. You have heard of brain drain. We’re into brain gain here at the Flatwater Free Press.
And some of these voices belong to the most experienced reporters in Nebraska, journalists with deep contacts, decades of institutional knowledge, an understanding of how things work.
Put together, I believe the people talking on the other side of my office door to be the best collection of journalistic talent that the state has seen in my quarter-century on the job here.
I blinked, and the Flatwater Free Press is no longer a news infant groping around a dark broom closet. It’s now a 18-person force. On our best weeks, we show Nebraskans what makes Nebraska special, and also reveal to readers what is broken here and may need fixing.
Our stories have won awards, changed laws, gotten bad actors fired, made powerful people mad and, in multiple cases, changed regular Nebraskans’ lives for the better.
Flatwater turns five years old in September. So we are going to do what one should do when a dream becomes a reality.
We’re throwing a party. Actually, five of them. And we hope you can join us, just as so many of you have joined as readers, subscribers, donors. Because you are the people powering our growth. You are the people granting us the ability to make a difference. Because we’re in this thing together.
A brief rundown:
On Saturday, Sept. 19, before Nebraska’s home football game, our journalists will be at the downtown Lincoln location of RAYGUN, 1219 P Street, from 2-4 p.m. Show up, buy a fresh Flatwater T-shirt in Cornhusker red and ask our journalists what you’ve always wanted to ask.
On Sunday, Sept. 20, at 5:30 p.m., we’re hosting a Flatwater Forum at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery’s auditorium. I will interview UNL grad Jenna Johnson, a senior editor at The Atlantic, who covered the 2016 Trump campaign for the Washington Post and has for years focused on our increasingly divisive politics. Also appearing: Yanqi Xu, our senior reporter and a current New York Times local investigations fellow, who will tell us about her newest eye-opening story, publishing soon in the NYT and Flatwater. This event is free! Register here.
On Monday evening, Sept. 21, we head to Omaha, to Film Streams’ Dundee Theater in midtown. We’re showing a documentary, “Storm Lake” and the stars of that documentary, small-town Iowa newspaper heroes Art Cullen and John Cullen, will speak after the show. This one was sold out, believe it or not – and then Film Streams moved it to the Dundee Theater because it can hold more people. Register fast for this one…I have a feeling the additional free tickets will go very quickly.
Tuesday is Trivia Night! Flatwater journalists are hosting a battle royale, complete with trivia about Nebraska news, history and sports at HopCat in Lincoln’s Capitol District. Show up by 6 p.m. You can win prizes from The Mill, Francie & Finch and two tickets to…
The Flatwater Free Press Festival, our big annual fundraiser! It’s no stuffy gala. It’s a goshdarn barn party and news pep rally rolled into one. FlatFest is being held Wednesday, Sept. 23, at a gorgeous barn a few minutes outside Lincoln. Famed New Yorker and Atlantic writer and author George Packer will be answering my questions onstage. We will serve up journalism-themed cocktails, food, birthday cake and (I bet) a gorgeous Nebraska sunset. It’s going to be epic. Support Flatwater and nonprofit news by buying your ticket here.
Learn more about any of these parties here. Join us. Celebrate with us. Let us celebrate you. And if you can’t, please know that we will be in your place soon, holding a listening session or a “journalism on stage” event or simply reporting the news. Urban stories. Rural stories. Suburban stories. We increasingly have the ability to do it all well.
During these five years, I have often put my head down and gotten lost in the day-to-day trials and tribulations of this thing we named Flatwater. The next story, headline, photo.
That’s not all bad. But when you are staring obsessively at a tree — or, say, a passive verb bugging you — it becomes hard to grasp the enormity of the forest.
So it feels important to hit this milestone, take a half-step back, pull in a deep breath and, for just a moment, consider what we’ve built and are building here.
An idea has become a reality. The reality is much bigger and better than we dreamt.
The reality is that, in five short years, the Flatwater Free Press has become a crucial part of the way we tell Nebraska stories to Nebraskans.
The skin on my forearms tingled as I wrote that last sentence. Because it’s true.
6 Comments
This article raises an interesting question for me: How does Flatwater measure success?
If this were a private corporate business, then some of the bullet points in this article would be very pertinent. Going from a small operation based in a janitorial closet to a statewide operation with a large staff spread across three cities would be a formidable accomplishment in the business world.
But I was under the impression that Flatwater is not a business? That it considers itself a “nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.” Thats what the statement at the bottom of this page claims, at any rate.
With that being the case, one might think that on the fifth anniversary rather than bragging about how many offices are being leased or how large the staff has become, Flatwater might measure it’s success by more news-centric benchmarks? How many big stories have you broken? How many corrupt politicians have been forced out of office as a result of your reporting? In what ways has Flatwater been able to show that it’s efforts have made Nebraska’s citizens more aware of major events in their state?
I haven’t read everything Flatwater has published in the last 5 years, so perhaps I can’t speak to the whole portfolio of accomplishments. But I have been reading for about a year, and if I were to judge Flatwater by “news-centric” benchmarks such as those examples I gave above, then Flatwater’s score would be very “mixed” at best. Every so often you publish a good article that reveals new information that the public in Nebraska really needs to know (such as revealing Dan Osborn’s tampering with rival political parties). But the overwhelming majority of articles I’ve read on this site seem to be either mindless filler content (such as the infamous time you reported that guys with man buns like to play frisbee in the park), or highly biased political puff pieces (such as the regular articles making very questionable arguments to prop up public transportation and green energy).
Perhaps your fifth anniversary is a good opportunity for some reflection and soul searching in regards to what the mission of this newspaper should be. If you are just here to make money and enjoy bossing around a large staff of people, then sure, some high-fives are in order. But if the mission of a newspaper is to report the news, it may be time to realign your operation toward that objective.
Nebraska really needs news sources that will report pertinent facts without political bias and doesn’t keep those facts hidden behind a paywall. You could be such a a news source, but you aren’t there yet.
I find this self-congratulatory efforts to be rather gauche.
When one is doing a job well, the well-done job speaks for itself. When one seeks publicity to celebrate one’s efforts, it’s usually because the job is not well done.
I have to agree.
Running a thoughtful commentary on the fifth anniversary of your newspaper being launched? Okay, fair enough.
But throwing yourself a party and running ads on your front page selling tickets? Cringe!
It’s almost like FFP should have 2 sections…the “exposing bad behavior” section and the “feel good blog articles” section.
FFP has had some decent investigative articles. The Pillen Farms nitrate issue, the law enforcement racial bias issue that law enforcement says is not an issue, the doctor in Norfolk making a zillion dollars, the Dan Osborn operatives, etc. This publication misses the mark, though, in not devoting more effort to doing more investigative stories and exposing more knuckleheads doing knucklehead things.
Hello! Matthew Hansen here. We do have a dual journalistic purpose, an explanation of which you can find at the top of our “about” page or various other places on our site. It says, ” The Flatwater Free Press is Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.” So 1. Investigations and 2. Feature stories that matter. (Sometimes we call them “stories that bind the state together.”) Interestingly, many readers want us to do more of 2 and less of 1. You obviously prefer the opposite, which is fine. We’re constantly working both to make sure the balance is correct as we see it. We’re also constantly working to raise the level of our reporting in all the ways. Thanks for reading, and I’m truly glad you like the “exposing more knuckleheads doing knucklehead things” part of that equation.
Even if we assume that “1” and “2” are different things, I don’t really believe more people want you to be the second thing, rather than the first. “Reader’s Digest, Omaha Edition” doesn’t sound very appealing to anybody under the age of 70. And you constantly get negative feedback on these articles from people who are just flabbergasted that you feel the need to inform the world about the incredibly obvious “news” that guys with man buns sometimes play frisbee in the park.
Which is why, even if I were willing to accept that “feature stories” means anything other than whatever you felt like writing about that day, you still fail on the “that matter” part of your mission statement. Because it very literally does not matter at all!
Please stop trying to push these goofy human interest stories. Because thats a bit of a “knucklehead thing” too.