From Picas to Bytes: Four Generations of Seacrest Newspaper Service to Nebraska

by Faith A. Colburn

Second-place winner in the Nebraska Press Women's adult nonfiction book category. If you want to know how a newspaper can serve a community, here is how it is done. This family memoir reveals a family of early adopters who used technological innovation to keep a mid-sized daily newspaper in business while many others closed their doors. But the Seacrest newspaper legacy reaches far beyond keeping a newspaper in business. It also includes strong First Amendment protections supported by the belief that the people have a right to know what their government does in their name. It involves tireless work to make Lincoln economically sound and safe, a good place to raise a family. And there were those innovations, not just in technology, but also in labor relations and in community development. From Picas to Bytes chronicles more than 100 years of untiring dedication to First Amendment protections, community building, and technological innovation.

ebook

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.