One of my New Year’s resolutions is to more regularly provide updates to you, the folks who support our work at the Flatwater Free Press. There are so many things I consider important, so regularly, that it can be a little daunting.
Still, I want to start making good on more regular transparency. There’s a lot to cover. We’ve got a new beat — one with a fitting connection to the past. We’ve got new hires and a court date.
Let’s dive on in.
New Beat
It’s been a joy to watch one of our first hires, Natalia Alamdari, blossom. After three years on the front lines of daily journalism, covering breaking education news in Delaware, she joined us in launching the Flatwater Free Press. We’ve thrown her into all kinds of assignments, and she’s knocked each one out of the park.
We asked her to dig into Nebraska’s prison system. She did, examining the failure of prison programming, an epidemic of overtime and the cost of an increasingly aging prison population. She also wove some incredible stories, most notably her dispatches from the Polish hotel Nebraskans made the epicenter of their Ukrainian aid efforts.
She’s as capable of investigations as she is a touching feature. And that’s why I’m proud to announce she will be the Flatwater Free Press’ first Seacrest Greater Nebraska Reporter. Her mission in that role is both specific and broad: tell the stories of each and every facet of Nebraska… that isn’t in Omaha or Lincoln. That includes features. It includes investigations. It means a whole lot of travel.
Natalia’s already shown her aptitude for this role, covering an incredible art gallery in McCook and a wind farm tussle in the panhandle. I’ve seen her story list, and rest assured that is just beginning. Congratulations Natalia!
Astute readers may recognize the name at the front of Natalia’s new title. Over the past year, it’s been an honor to get to know Rhonda Seacrest. She was among the first people to support Flatwater. If memory serves, we were so shocked to receive her check, we didn’t even have a process in place to handle it.
We finally met in-person at a launch party in September 2021. Since then, she’s allowed me into her home every few weeks, and it is the best part of my weekly Lincoln visits. I always learn something new about this state, its politics and characters. And she’s just a joy, to boot.
She’s been kind enough to share stories of her husband, James C. Seacrest, who spent 40 years publishing several Nebraska newspapers. From his fight against an antisemitic sect to his steadfast commitment to keeping Nebraska news local, he sounds like a man after my own heart. Couple his legacy with Rhonda’s — whom you may remember as the inspiration for a deep dive into Nebraska’s homesteading roots — and I can’t imagine a better namesake for this important role.
The Seacrest Greater Nebraska Reporter is further supported by the Nebraska Community Foundation, Ron & Carol Cope Foundation, Kitty M. Perkins Foundation, Shoemaker Family Foundation and the Johnny Carson Foundation. We’re grateful to be able to pursue this important work.
New Jobs
Natalia’s new gig isn’t our only cool Greater Nebraska effort. In partnership with the folks at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Journalism and Mass Communications, we’ve launched a yearlong investigative fellowship program. This full-time journalism student will begin working with us Wednesday and stick around through the end of the calendar year.
We’re thrilled to have Evelyn Mejia join us as the inaugural Rural Fellow.
Evelyn is a junior at UNL, studying journalism with a minor in Spanish. Born and raised in Norfolk, she graduated from Norfolk Senior High in 2020. One of her stories was part of a series that won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Journalism Award in 2022, and she’s spent the past year or so interning at the Lincoln Journal Star. Upon graduation in May 2024, she would like to continue working in investigative journalism.
As our Rural Fellow, she will spend at least half her time on investigations in Greater Nebraska. She will partner regularly with the rest of our staff in churning out the world-class journalism you’ve come to expect.
With Natalia moving over to Greater Nebraska, we want to ensure we don’t lose a foothold in the city we call home. Next week, we’ll post a role for an investigative reporter who will focus on Omaha. This isn’t a city hall job. Sure, we suspect city investigations will be part of it. But the reporter will also look at development, housing, businesses and all the other things that make this a community.
Speaking of business, yesterday we announced our acquisition of Silicon Prairie News. That comes with an additional full-time reporter, who will grace the Flatwater Free Press from time to time. If you’re especially interested in stories about Nebraska businesses and start-ups, you can pre-subscribe and help us shape the new job through this survey.
For those keeping track at home, this means our small but mighty newsroom is set to more than double. It’s going to mean more stories, more scoops, more planning. In other words: We need another editor.
I’m thrilled to share that Charlyne Berens has agreed to take that on. Charlyne barely needs an introduction. (But if you need one, here you go). She was co-publisher and editor of the Seward Independent. She has spent years teaching at UNL. She’s published books and led editing seminars and is just generally one of the most impressive folks you can imagine. We’re going to benefit, bigtime, from her presence.
See You in Court
Finally, you may recall that we’ve been engaged in a lawsuit with the Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy over its response to our public records request for emails regarding nitrate in groundwater.
We asked for emails. The state told us it would cost around $45,000 to get them. That figure was mostly related to the cost of having employees go through their own emails and decide whether they were legally releasable.
The law says legal fees cannot be part of the cost. In my decidedly not legal opinion, that seems to be at odds with the estimate we received. So we sued.
On November 29, the judge in the case issued a letter asking the state to verify that they are in compliance with the law. In December, the state did, coming back with the exact same estimate.
Now we’re going to court. We’ll be in Lancaster County on February 2.
Consider this your formal invitation. Should be fun!
Thank You
Believe it or not, all of these announcements are just the tip of the iceberg. I expect I’ll be back in your inbox very soon with another major announcement, one that’s going to lay the long-term foundation for the Flatwater Free Press and its parent organization, the Nebraska Journalism Trust.
It’s hard to believe how much we’ve achieved in so little time. And it is all, ALL, thanks to you. If not for your willingness to get behind this effort, if not for you telling your friends and reading our work and donating what you can, none of this would be possible.
I don’t say it enough: Thank you. Much more to come.
With gratitude,
—Matt Wynn, Executive Director
