The newsletter today comes to you from the living room of my childhood home six miles outside Red Cloud. My parents just fed half of the Flatwater Free Press staff breakfast burritos and cinnamon rolls. I reluctantly have taken my leave — duty calls! — as they chat and laugh on the back deck while the cows moo and the May country breeze rustles the white birch tree planted when I was a toddler.
I’ll tell you a bit more about why we’re here in a minute. First, the news.
Hidden research: It’s a seemingly straightforward question, one I asked on social media this week. One I feel compelled to ask again today.
FFP state government watchdog reporter Sara Gentzler broke the story of this internal research, which appears to cast doubt on the canal project’s benefits. The Legislature is mere days away from approving an eye-popping $575 million for it. As of Wednesday, almost no one in state government knew of the existence of this research — which, to be clear, is ostensibly done for the knowledge of state lawmakers.
I don’t know about you, but this Nebraskan darn well expects my state senator to look at all available info before voting on a thing that may end up costing the state a cool billion in state funds. A cool billion of our money.
The face of modern HIV: HIV recently spiked in white men living in rural Nebraska. And it continues to disproportionately affect Black Nebraskans, who accounted for 5% of the state’s population but 21% of the new HIV diagnoses in 2021.
Those are two revelations in FFP correspondent Bob Glissmann’s story on the changing reality of HIV/AIDS in our state. Bob also did a nice job of showing what it’s like to live with this disease that was, for so long, a death knell. But no longer.
FFP’s watchdog is watchdogging: A state program is meant to pay hospital bills of violent crime victims directly, so the traumatized victims don’t have to worry. Two years after this reform, not a single hospital has successfully billed the state program.
FFP state watchdog reporter Sara Gentzler has been busy! This is a follow-up to her story illustrating that this program meant to use federal dollars to aid victims of violent crime is helping a shockingly small number of Nebraskans.
Listening in my hometown: This week, FFP exec director Matt Wynn, FFP’s Seacrest Greater Nebraska reporter Natalia Alamdari and yours truly travelled to Red Cloud. It was the latest stop on the Flatwater Free Press Listening Tour, which takes us to Nebraska’s smaller cities and small towns to do as the name suggests…listen.
Yesterday, Matt and Natalia heard about a downtown hotel that will open next year and is expected to supercharge Willa Cather-related tourism to the area. They heard from a couple raising bees and selling honey, another couple that rejuvenated and saved the local grocery store, another couple that has started multiple cool businesses in town including a bike rental company and more.
While they did this, I went back in time, to Red Cloud High School, to speak to Mrs. Barry’s sophomore English class, which peppered me with amazing questions. I also spoke to the class that I first enrolled in on a whim 27 years ago, the class that ignited my first true professional passion in life, the class that led me to this spot to be writing you today.
The journalism class.
This was, by my count, our 8th listening tour stop. It was a special one to me. Thank you to the dozens and dozens of Red Cloudians we spoke to Thursday. And thank you to my parents, for the breakfast burritos, for the lodging and for hosting a wonderful post-listening tour party.
Do you want your town, city or neighborhood included on the Listening Tour? Shoot an email to exec director Matt Wynn at [email protected].
We’re doing the thing: Finally today, a brief moment of celebration and reflection. The FFP staff took home three Great Plains Journalism Awards, we announced this week. We won for coverage of Nebraska’s troubled correctional system, for an exposé on an out-of-state company that’s become one of Omaha’s biggest landlords and for a story on a skatepark in Nebraska’s poorest county, and the magical thing that happened there. (Read all those stories here.)
When I was a reporter, I would shove any awards I won in a desk drawer and plow ahead. A new story had to be written!
This hits a little differently for me. Our board of directors, Matt Wynn and I started the Flatwater Free Press 20 months ago. It was an idea to deliver important, well-told stories to Nebraskans. It was a hope, a wing, a prayer.
Now we have brilliant reporters churning out stories which are educating Nebraskans, making a difference, even winning awards.
It’s a reality.
You helped make it a reality by reading, by encouraging, by giving, by telling us, over and over, in word and deed, how important this work is.
Ok. Onto the next story.
Sincerely,
—Matthew Hansen, Executive Editor
Here’s what we’re into this week: News from around Nebraska
Every week we like to share great Nebraska journalism, no matter who made it. Here’s what caught our eye this week:
- Kids cleaning slaughterhouses. Grand Island teachers who first learned of it when they discovered acid burns on a child. CBS’ 60 Minutes with the story showing us that in 2023 we still need to work to stamp out illegal and inhumane child labor.
- A famed journalist has just released a book focused on James Scurlock, killed in downtown Omaha on May 30, 2020, and Jake Gardner, the man who killed Scurlock and then later, when facing arrest, took his own life. I haven’t yet read the “Lost Sons of Omaha, but I did read this essay written by the author, Joe Sexton.
- NTV’s Steve White with the story of how a central Nebraska school is using an old concept, and new science, to teach kids to read.
- Five hundred books in the Plattsmouth school libraries are under review. The librarian quit after testifying against what’s happening. A child of the school board member who crafted the policy showed up to a packed school board meeting to…testify against it. This important story from KETV Channel 7.
- One in four Nebraska students are chronically absent from school, a new and important story from Omaha World-Herald reporter Lauren Wagner shows. FFP has also put some focus on chronic absenteeism, its causes and its effects — and the towns where students are missing the most class.
- And finally, my favorite story of the week. I basically cheered when I saw a main character attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, because the Nebraska connection meant I could share the story with you.
Why are so many Asian-American women named Connie? And what does it tell us about immigration, about assimilation, about representation and about chasing the American Dream?
A lovely, heartfelt essay from author Connie Wang.
