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50 editions later, Nebraska Rural Living is going strong
by Phil Soreide

This is the 50th edition of Nebraska Rural Living. And while, granted, it’s not our 50th anniversary, it’s still a milestone worthy of reflection. We’ve covered a lot of ground.

Our story, for our new readers — we now attract almost 30,000 visitors a month and constantly add new readers — is that in 2003, two sisters, Betty Sayers and Nancy Herhahn, returned to the Nebraska town where they’d grown up and gone to high school. Although Holdrege has weathered the pressures of gradual depopulation better than many towns, it was far from the vibrant, bustling retail center it had been in the 1960s. The sisters wanted to do something to help.

With a small grant, they gathered the names and addresses of people who had graduated from high school in the south central and southwest part of the state, developed a direct mail campaign, and built a website called Business Beyond the Farm where they hoped alumni would come to interact with each other and perhaps consider returning home. Each of the towns that shared their alumni list became a sponsor, and had a profile on the site.

The sisters meet me

In 2005, the sisters met me, an event which changed directions for all of us. I had moved to Holdrege when my wife took the job as director of the Holdrege library, and I was casting about for local clients. Propitiously, I moved in next door to Betty Sayers, and, after I got to know Betty a little, she shared their business plan with me. I suggested they change the format to an e-magazine, which would have new content each month and seek to establish an audience not just among alumni, but among anyone interested in the life and lifestyle of Nebraska’s rural cities and towns.

After all, to my way of thinking, many smaller Nebraska cities and towns have plenty to recommend them, including good schools and healthcare, affordable housing, low crime, clean air, and a sense of community and togetherness that just doesn’t happen in big cities.

Betty and Nancy made me editor of the new online enterprise, and working with our web goddess, Kim Woods, we developed a format, revamped our content and launched NebraskaRuralLiving.com.

No shortage of content

Since that time in 2006, we’ve tramped all over rural Nebraska, talked to dozens of fascinating characters, uncovered plenty of fun and interesting things to do, and got the inside story on scores of successful rural businesses.

Regular readers of Nebraska Rural Living have learned a little about

• Sprint car racing
• Goat farming
• Fish farming
• Truck farming
• Barrel making
• Dog training
• Diesel engines
• Antique car restoration
• Fishing guides
• Prosthetics
• Organic seeds
• Composite components, and
• Sausage making as well as numerous stories about other interesting businesses, restaurants, retailers and individuals.

We’ve also published dozens of essays and articles from our readers. Some are serious, even scholarly, such as Professor John Anderson’s article on how small towns create social capital, but mostly they are observations, personal stories or memoirs, such as Mary Kay Nelson’s reminiscences about the dogs of her childhood.

We’ve allowed realtors to post real estate listings and commercial opportunities on our site, so there’s always a current selection, and last year, we worked with a number of development agencies and got the CareerLink jobs database enabled on NRL, with a focus on jobs available in the rural regions of southwest and south central Nebraska. We have always had a collection of links we think would be useful to anyone considering relocating to our part of the world. We don’t charge for any of this.

We have fun, too

Probably the most fun we have every month is preparing the Rural Foodies column, which means we all have to get together, decide on a restaurant, all have different meals when we go, harass the wait staff and owners, and then hash out what we’re going to say afterwards. We started the Rural Foodies column as a lark, but it’s become one of the most popular features on the site, and while we thought we would run out of restaurants and other topics, we keep finding more.

What matters about Nebraska Rural Living is not the website so much as the community of people it created. We’ve found some wonderful writers who regularly enhance the depth and quality of NRL, especially Gene Morris, Pat Underwood and Jennifer Chick. We’ve found some sponsors who continue to support us financially, and we’ve made friends with lots of people in rural development, who share our interest in this uniquely American lifestyle.

In the end, what matters most about Nebraska Rural Living is you, and people like you, who can appreciate the simple pleasures of a meadowlark’s song, a clear view of the horizon, knowing your neighbor, putting in an honest day’s work, sitting down to dinner together, big trees, wide streets, kids on bikes, and not locking your door. That’s what we celebrate. And we aren’t stopping now.

Read the full press release (.pdf file)

A thirty-odd-year veteran in marketing and communications, Phil Soreide is the editor of Nebraska Rural Living, among other projects of his business, One Good Adguy LLC. He lives in Holdrege. He can be reached at editor@nebraskaruralliving.com.

To learn more about how you can be a writer for Nebraska Rural Living, and have your essays posted on this site, visit our 'Writers Wanted' page.

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