Matthew Hansen is the editor of the Flatwater Free Press, Nebraska’s first statewide nonprofit news source, which he co-founded in 2021. Hansen, a Red Cloud native, is a veteran of Nebraska newspapers, previously working as a reporter at the Lincoln Journal Star and then a reporter and metro columnist at the Omaha World-Herald. During his time in newspapers, he travelled to Afghanistan and Cuba and won multiple state, regional and national awards for investigations, feature stories and columns. He was the 2015 Great Plains Writer of the Year.