Editor in Chief

Courtney Lowery

Writer, farmer, farmer's wife, sometimes guitar player, lover of a good whiskey on the rocks.

	Chief Cook & Bottle Washer. Photo by Matthew Frank of Frankly, Studios.

Courtney had told NewWest.Net CEO and Publisher Jonathan Weber when she was in college that if he ever got a wild hair to do another start-up, she'd be in. Four years later, he took her up on that offer and together, they launched NewWest.Net.

Traditionally trained, she cut her journalism teeth with Lee Newspapers and the Associated Press where she worked as a writer and editor. Early on, however, NewWest.Net made her into a reluctant new media maven and while journalism is still at the heart of all of it, she's a little bit of a geek. Little did she know, her farming background on the barren Montana plains made her pretty good at breaking things and then fixing them -- something that comes in handy when running a built-from-the-ground-up scrappy Web business.

Her journalism passions continue to revolve around politics, land use, rural issues, agriculture, class and all topics in which these intersect.

While she vowed as a girl never to marry a farmer, she fell in love with one anyway and in 2009, she and her husband, Jacob Cowgill, (who also works as the state agriculture liaison for Sen. Jon Tester) started working their own little piece of organic ground about 15 miles from where she grew up.

Courtney also founded the Rural News Network class at the University of Montana, a project that aims to connect UM students with rural Montana and get them up to speed with the online medium while helping small towns revive their newspapers online. Now in its third year, the students continue to inspire their teacher and the project continues to help keep small-town journalism alive. The first town site in the Rural News Network was born in Courtney's hometown: The Dutton Country Courier.