From Picas To Bytes: Four Generations of Seacrest Newspaper Service to Lincoln

by Faith A. Colburn

Second-place winner in the Nebraska Press Women's adult nonfiction book category. Almost 20 years ago, I conducted my first interview with Joe R. Seacrest. I never had another. I don't know if Joe knew when we spoke that we would not finish the project we started together that day, but in that one interview, he gave me the entire structure of my story. When Joe R. died March 28, 1995, I knew I was on my own. I didn't even know what I had in that one interview until I'd tracked down a number of people who could tell me about the newspapers. The project was aimed at revealing how the Seacrest family used technological innovation to keep a mid-sized daily newspaper in business while many others closed their doors. But as I conducted the other interviews, about thirty of them, it became apparent that the Seacrest newspaper legacy reached far beyond keeping a newspaper in business. It included leadership in those technological innovations I'd set out to discover, but it also included strong First Amendment protections supported by the belief that the people have a right to know what their government does in their name; and tireless work to make Lincoln economically sound and safe, a good place to raise a family. From Picas to Bytes: Four Generations of Seacrest Newspaper Service to Nebraska chronicles more than 100 years of technological innovation, untiring dedication to First Amendment protections, and community building. If you want to know how a newspaper can serve its community, here is how it's done.

224 pages, Paperback

First published September 7, 2014

About the author

As the daughter of a big band canary, Faith A. Colburn has unique insights into the backstage lives of the women who sang for their supper during some very hard times. Her other half, a combat veteran and farmer, provided some very different perspectives. With her grandmother, she walked the prairies, getting to know the wildflowers, while she waited for the two halves to finish their struggle to make a whole. She’s the award-winning author of fiction and narrative non-fiction that reveals the character of the prairie and its people, combining careful research with a plainswoman’s passion for her place.

Walking the grasslands, she smelled tiny onion blossoms so sweet they’ll make your ears ring and watched pronuba moths fall like petals from the waxy, white blossoms of yucca. As a public information officer for the state Game and Parks Commission, she canoed the Dismal, rode the Sandhills with dog trainers, cross country skied the Missouri bluffs, seined carp, fixed nets, picked trout eggs, and camped out along Bone Creek. She photographed wildlife, from Sandhill cranes to elk and, as a sixth-generation Nebraskan, knows of the landscape that often appears as a character/catalyst in her work.

The themes she returns to, over and over, are the ways in which families and communities work and how they fail. She's passionate about those families and communities as well as the physical environments that allow them to thrive.

She earned master’s degrees in creative writing and journalism from the University of Nebraska receiving the Outstanding Thesis in the College of Fine Arts and Humanities in 2012 and the Outstanding Work in Fiction Award during its 2009 student conference. Her family memoir FROM PICAS TO BYTES: FOUR GENERATIONS OF SEACREST NEWSPAPER SERVICE TO NEBRASKA received the second place award in adult non-fiction from the Nebraska Federation of Press Women. Her fiction has appeared in Kinesis and Platte Valley Review, and her poetry has been published in The Reynolds Review. While at the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, she wrote numerous articles for NEBRASKAland magazine, including a Centennial history of game and fish management in Nebraska that appeared as a special issue called Sportsman’s Scrapbook.