If you are curious about how many local journalists it takes to change a lightbulb, the answer might surprise you. Let’s just say, if you happened to find a typo in this week’s newspaper, the reason is simple: We were reading the pages in the dark.

There’s an old saying about government: “It’s not that ‘what is said isn’t so,’ it’s ‘what is so isn’t said.’” So that means that someone—maybe a state auditor, maybe a whistleblower, but often a news reporter—needs to dig in and find out what is really happening with our tax dollars and state policies.

If you have ever spent an extended amount of time hospitalized, or really any time in a hospital at all, there is one thing that you can quickly become an expert on. Jell- O.

As I sit down to write this column, my tomatoes have finally met with a hard freeze and the cannas we plant in the local park are giving up their red-topped glory. It was one, long fall in my section of southeast Nebraska, with lots of warm days and, only recently, a couple of cold snaps.

There’s a game of musical chairs going on at the state capitol, and who gets a chair is in question. Last week, former State Senator Tom Briese of Albion announced his resignation as state treasurer.

I recently heard some rumblings that there were some new residents spotted in my neighborhood. No, neither new neighbors who moved in and took up a new address, nor those cows that I encountered grazing along my driveway while heading to work on Friday morning, but rather, new neighbors of the most exciting kind.

Nebraska is cattle country. We used to be known as “The Beef State”—a nickname I always liked.

I almost made it. I could have hit the gas and sped through the crossing, but I knew that if I did there was always a chance I didn’t make it in time.

There’s an old saying about government: “What is said isn’t so, it’s what is so isn’t said.” So that means that someone—maybe a state auditor, maybe a whistleblower, but often a news reporter— needs to dig in and find out what is really happening with our tax dollars. That’s why it was so disgusting to read recently about our “Secretary of War’s” crackdown on access by reporters to the Pentagon.

The Ravenna Volunteer Fire Department could have, possibly, saved my life. In my twelve years as a small town newspaper publisher, I have attended my fair share of educational sessions with local fire departments and have taken numerous photographs of kids climbing on the departments’ rigs during Fire Prevention Week.