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(6) stories found containing '2023 word of the year'


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  • Marco's Journey: As others sleep, a Nebraska high schooler survives the graveyard shift

    Natalia Alamdari, Flatwater Free Press|Dec 18, 2024

    SCHUYLER – His eyes are tired from scanning the conveyor belt. His feet and back are sore after hours of standing in his steel-toed boots. His brain is fried from searching for faulty welding and chipped paint on the more than 1,000 metal pieces that whiz past him on the belt during the graveyard shift. Marco Gutiérrez has spent the past eight hours inspecting tiny parts that will become car seats in Ford F-150s and Chevy Malibus. Before that, he put in a shift at Panda Express, cooking ba...

  • Sheep producers send thousands of pounds of wool to landfills. A Nebraska business aims to change that.

    Lori Potter, Flatwater Free Press|Oct 16, 2024

    One word best defines how Megan Landes-Murphy and her husband Tom Murphy met, made career choices and launched a unique-to-Nebraska business. Sheep. Neither spent much time around the animals while growing up in northwest Wisconsin and the Omaha area, respectively. Now, they have sheep, a few chickens and two Great Pyrenees dogs named Milo and Birdie on their 12-acre ranch east of the small south-central Nebraska town of Lawrence. Two years ago, Landes-Murphy launched Kestrel Ridge Pellet Co.,...

  • Isms: Original views on life from rural America

    LuAnn Schindler, Publsiher|Jan 4, 2024

    What does it mean to be authentic? Credible. Trustworthy. Real. Genuine. These synonyms for the 2023 word of the year, as selected by the folks at Merriam-Webster, make an important statement about the times in which we live. In an interview with the Associated Press, editor-at-large Peter Sokolowski said searches on the dictionary’s website for the definition of “authentic” are normally high. But in 2023, Sokolowski reported searches were “boosted to new heights.” “We see in 2023 a kind of cris...

  • Original views on life from rural America LuAnn Schindler, Publisher

    LuAnn Schindler, Publsiher|Nov 16, 2023

    A journalism friend of mine recently hit a milestone birthday - she’s 65 now and thinks she will officially retire from the daily grind of deadlines and late night writing sessions which have fueled much of her newspaper career. She’s a community journalist at heart, a farmer’s wife who spends her down time gathering eggs from the chicken coop and maneuvering a grain cart in tandem with the big red combine, harvesting rows of corn and soybeans. There are grandkids to spend time with, committee r...

  • Take Note: It's going to be a great School Year.

    LuAnn Schindler, Publisher|Aug 17, 2023

    Drive, and the pursuit of following one's aspirations, took center stage, Tuesday, as Summerland Public School students returned for the opening day of the 2023-2024 school year. Superintendent Kyle Finke said several changes in the district give students "everything you need to be successful, no matter what you decide to do." Finke introduced the word of the year - drive - for the upcoming school term. "I hope you have some drive this year, that you focus on that and become better and better st...

  • Could Critical Race Theory be the next Nebraska Legislature hot button?

    J.L. Schmidt, Statehouse Correspondent Nebraska Press Association|Jul 27, 2023

    If you thought that the mostly one-sided filibuster-driven debate on transgender issues and abortion was the thing that dragged the 2023 Nebraska Legislature to a near standstill, steel yourself for what could lie ahead. State Senator Dave Murman of Glenvil, the chair of the Legislature's Education Committee, says he wants to study the use of critical race theory and other controversial subjects in the classroom. Innocently enough, the studies stem from a request to investigate the Nebraska...