Earlier this week, the great rural blog The Daily Yonder posted a cool map of government data of average compensation in rural counties (includes wages, employer contributions for pension plans, insurance plans, government social insurance and bonuses). Here’s the post and a larger version of the map. The data is from 2008, which might be a [...]

I had a chance Monday to do some checking in on some of the things going on in some Central Nebraska over the past few weeks. Here’s what I found: Burwell — The big news out of Burwell is that the city council is taking bids for the Community Memorial Health Center, Burwell’s city-owned nursing home [...]

One of the regular routines of the Central Nebraska beat involves going through many of the area’s weekly newspapers for nuggets of news. Sometimes those nuggets are splashed across the front page, and other times they’re hidden in the tiny print of public meeting minutes or even advertisements. I don’t typically report on many of [...]

We’re nearing the end of summer, which means we’re also nearing the end of rural small towns’ community festival season. (This season never really ends, but it does slow down quite a bit from September to May.) I spend a lot of my time in the summer writing about these festivals, and I think they’re an [...]