A Year in, Still Fitting the Pieces Together

This is National Newspaper Week, and it comes at a fitting time for me. Last September, I came back to this office, where I had worked for a short time early in my career designing and selling ads for the Nemaha County Herald. This time I came back to report the news, build the paper each week and expand our online presence.
In the newsroom, we call laying out the paper “doing the puzzle.” Each week starts with a pile of pieces: meeting stories, photos, obituaries, ads, the court docket, sports scores. Some snap into place. Others need trimming. A few wait for next week or go online. There’s no picture on the box. We find out what the week looks like as we put it together.
The puzzle got bigger last year. In July 2025, the Herald and the Tecumseh Chieftain combined to form the Nemaha Valley Observer, covering Nemaha and Johnson counties. The Chieftain had served Tecumseh since 1869, and the Herald had covered Auburn and Nemaha County since 1882. The Observer name is a year old. The work behind it is not. Our job now is fitting every community from Brownville to Sterling into one paper.
Over the past year, my colleagues and I have covered all manor of events like city councils, school boards, recalls, murals, festivals and state championships, and we’ve talked with people about their businesses, farms and families.
Anyone who has worked a jigsaw puzzle knows you start with the edges. For a local paper, the edges are the public record: what a city council decided, how a school district spends its money, what came before the court. Many weeks, we are the only people in the room taking notes. I didn’t fully understand what that meant until I was on this side of the newsroom. If no one writes those things down, most people might never find out, and the rest of the picture has nothing to hold it in place.
When I ask folks what they read first, most say the court docket. That’s OK. It’s an edge piece, too.
We don’t have every piece. Some of the most important come from readers: a tip, a correction, a photo from a game we couldn’t get to. Local papers keep the record for the places they serve, and they depend on the people who read them, advertise in them and help fill in what’s missing.
Thank you for reading, subscribing and stopping me at the grocery store or Wellness Center to tell me what you think. If you have a story we should tell, call the office or email me. I’d be honored to put it in the puzzle.
Rebecca Johnson is an editor at the Nemaha Valley Observer. Her email is [email protected].