John Heaston’s life was too short, but he accomplished many things during his long publishing career.
To his family, he was son, brother, uncle, and life partner. To his friends and colleagues, he was a Puck-like character, an optimistic dreamer who could talk practically anyone into anything.
To Omaha, however, he was an unlikely – given his alt-newspaper sensibility – cheerleader. While he sought to bring the powerful to account and understand the marginalized, Heaston also loved the city, its neighborhoods, its people, and most of all its music and culture scene. The ultimate creator, Heaston was a writer, publisher, organizer, marketer, promoter, and above all, an entrepreneur constantly devising new business lines to keep his main effort, The Reader, alive.
The news outlet, which began as a weekly paper found throughout the Old Market when it started about three decades ago, has outlived its creator. Heaston died May 31 of a complications around a pernicious form of chronic myeloid leukemia. He was 53.
Heaston donated The Reader and its bilingual sister publication, El Perico to Nebraska Public Media, the statewide NPR and PBS nonprofit media company which is operating The Reader’s websites and social media accounts.
Nancy Finken, chief content officer at Nebraska Public Media, said she and Heaston had “many conversations” about the importance of nonprofit journalism and their shared missions. She said Heaston had been looking for “a good steward” to manage The Reader’s archives and continue coverage of the arts and culture in underrepresented communities in the Omaha area.
“So it was the perfect fit,” she said.
For his part, Heaston had told Nebraska Public Media he has happy that The Reader and El Perico could continue to make an impact and said so in a press release posted on the nonprofit’s website.
“I’m confident the network has the talent, vision and integrity to continue our work in the same tradition that has made our publications known as trustworthy, timely sources of news and information,” Heaston said in the press release.
Heaston was also this in life, a winker. From his days sitting in Creighton Prep’s detention office to creating a platform in The Reader for counter-cultural voices, Heaston winked at the establishment. And he winked at life. Despite championing underdog causes, Heaston never seemed to take himself too seriously and approached sources, employees, business partners, and the public with the same curious nature, hopeful outlook, and winking smile.
The fact Heaston died hours before an Omaha Press Club event to honor and wink back at him through the requisite roast was the ultimate play, Ben Heaston, John’s younger brother, noted wryly at the event that still went on — though more as a wake of sorts.
“True to form, he found a way to make this more difficult for me. He’s not even with us anymore, and somehow, he roasted me better,” Ben Heaston told a packed Press Club room while wearing a bright orange tux and hat from the 1994 film “Dumb and Dumber” that John had instructed he don for the occasion.
Ben Heaston said his brother helped found Omaha’s Earth Day celebration and the Omaha Entertainment Awardsbut was best known for founding and publishing The Reader, “which filled a need… while delivering honest grass-roots journalism intended to make the Omaha community more thoughtful.”
Diagnosed in 2020 with a cancer that typically is treatable, Heaston threw himself into understanding his illness, said his life partner of 20 years, Lori Umstead. She said Heaston networked with experts and other sufferers, documented the two stem cell transplants he wound up needing, and believed throughout he would survive the disease. It was a similar approach he’d brought to understanding social problems.
“He’s pretty eternally optimistic,” Umstead said. “He wasn’t going to wallow in why things happened but how he was going to change it. It’s so easy to read and complain and say what you would do.”
Ben Heaston roasted his brother’s “annoying positivity … always playing Captain Save Everybody.”
Heaston was born in Frankfurt, Germany, where his father, Bill, a U.S. Army attorney was stationed at the time. It marked an interesting circle of life: John Heaston’s maternal grandparents had fled Germany during Hitler’s rise. They were Jewish teenage sweethearts who later found each other in the U.S. and were among the fortunate of the diaspora to have children and grandchildren. John was their first grandchild. And an Army brat.
“John intoxicated you. You became intoxicated with the energy and the connection and the opportunities and the future... He would teach you (that) you could do things you never thought you could. And I’m grateful.”
Anne Schlachter, Omaha public relations professional and advisor to The Reader
Heaston spent his formative years in places his father was stationed: West Point, New York, Alaska, Kansas, the Washington, D.C. beltway. When his father retired and took a corporate law position in Omaha, John was a teenager starting his junior year at Creighton Prep. He was bright – having skipped the second grade. He played soccer, easing what can be a difficult transition. He sometimes got crosswise with the Jesuits — once spending time in the detention office where he apparently pilfered clean demerit cards and handed them out. He would find ways outside the classroom to bend the law. The goal? Have fun.
This cost him in his early years. He lost a full-ride college scholarship at a private university out of state and got very close to a degree at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, where he also had earned the distinction wearing a mask — and mask only — while streaking at the homecoming parade.
But Heaston always seemed to land on his feet. His knack for capturing attention, a personal magnetism and deep desire to nurture Omaha’s indie music scene and Omaha stories led to a rich, creative life that made him a foundational figure in Omaha’s cultural scene.
Friends at the May 31 roast told detailed stories about John’s remarkable ability to talk anyone into anything — whether that was fellow Prep buddies securing an apartment where they could party or getting Omaha professionals to buy into and keep afloat The Reader.
Anne Schlachter, an Omaha public relations professional and advisor to The Reader, said Heaston could get people to go from “what?!” to “sure,” as he did when he approached her years ago about helping him with business strategy. At the Press Club roast, she described how Heaston would introduce “a harebrained pitch” with so much charisma she’d eventually agree to it.
“He’d get the nod going,” she said. “You get the smile, get a little side-eye, and then you get the gun.”
The gun was Heaston pointing his finger.
“When you get the gun, that’s your cue to say the first of these two words, ‘What?!’”
Inevitably, she and others would come around to “sure.”
“John intoxicated you,” she said. “You became intoxicated with the energy and the connection and the opportunities and the future... He would teach you (that) you could do things you never thought you could. And I’m grateful.”
“His coffee meetings turned into connections that led to business plans and fundraising and relationships that shape our organization to this day. He was a huge believer in rowing the same direction, that collaboration would always beat competition, and that local news made a place better and more just.”
Matt Wynn, Nebraska Journalism Trust Executive Director
Leo Louis II, president of the Malcom X Memorial Foundation board, recounted the first time he met Heaston. It was 2008. He and a group of other young Black men had just been kicked out of a community meeting at the Aframerican Book Store in north Omaha. The meeting had been about how to protest gun violence, and Louis and his friends didn’t think the idea being floated — marching with an empty casket — would have any effect and had said as much.
“Somebody says, ‘Well, what do you guys think should happen?’” Louis recounted at the roast. “We turn around and enter John Heaston.”
Louis said he and his friends were skeptical of the “squirrelly-looking white dude” but Heaston’s sincerity and persistence over time won their trust.
“He passed the test,” Louis said.
Umstead, Heaston’s life partner, credited him with being “very good at listening.”
“He’d keep asking questions, asking questions,” she said.
Nebraska Journalism Trust Executive Director Matt Wynn credited Heaston’s “knack for connecting” that played a direct role in the creation of the Flatwater Free Press and the journalism trust, both of which Wynn helped found.
“His coffee meetings turned into connections that led to business plans and fundraising and relationships that shape our organization to this day,” Wynn said. “He was a huge believer in rowing the same direction, that collaboration would always beat competition, and that local news made a place better and more just.”
Wynn said he initially viewed Heaston’s cancer diagnosis as just another odd that Heaston would overcome because “this guy overcame odds for a living.”
“I'm going to miss him,” Wynn said. “Omaha, Nebraska, and the national media scene is better for him being here.”
Heaston’s mother, Dorris, said the quality that stood out about her son was his kindness.
“He just wanted the world to be a better place for everybody,” she said. “He was very inclusive and very concerned and was passionate where he thought unfairness existed.”
Heaston’s entry into alternative news media began with alternative music and the seeming impending closure of a popular music venue at the time, the 1,400-capacity Sokol Hall south of downtown. It was 1990, and when Heaston complained that local Omaha news coverage missed the mark, someone said he should start his own paper.
In 1992, Heaston produced the nonprofit, volunteer-run Sound News and Arts. In 1994, he launched The Reader. The business always seemed to be treading water but despite industry headwinds like disappearing classified ad revenue, Heaston managed to keep it afloat. He shrank the printing schedule from weekly to monthly, and in 2004 added the Spanish-language publication, El Perico.
“He nearly lost The Reader how many times? He would reinvent … to keep the publication,” Umstead said.
Heaston opened a marketing business to help local companies, he turned to national organizations and efforts like the Google News Initiative and Association of Alternative Newsmedia. He invested time in boosting Black and Latino journalism.
“It wouldn’t occur to him he couldn’t try something,” Umstead said. “He knew he had privilege. He acknowledged that continuously. He wanted to use that privilege as leverage. He once said, ‘Maybe I listened to the Jesuits more than I thought.’”
In 2020, Heaston was diagnosed with cancer. A 2022 stem cell transplant (from brother Ben) offered hope. In 2023, the cancer was not abating and Heaston announced he was ending his run at The Reader. The last issue under his watch was printed Sept. 7, 2023.
Umstead, an arts, culture, and music fan, said The Reader had attracted her to Heaston years ago, and it played a role in how the two met.
“It was not ‘The Reader’ I was enamored with,” Umstead said.
“It was the person who’d create it.”
In addition to his mother, brother, and life partner, Heaston is survived by sisters Rita Clark of Omaha and Eileen Heaston of Anchorage, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, and cousins.