About New West
New West is a next-generation media company dedicated to the culture, economy, politics, environment and lifestyle of the Rocky Mountain West. Our core mission is to serve the Rockies with innovative, participatory journalism and to promote conversation that helps us understand and make the most of the dramatic changes sweeping our region. New West Publishing LLC, headquartered in Missoula, Montana, was founded in 2005 by Jonathan Weber.New West is comprised of:
NewWest.Net, the nationally-award-winning online news source
New West Events, interactive, comprehensive event calendars for Rocky Mountain communities.
New West Conferences, live events focused on fostering discussion about the changes in the region
New West Indoor, a local display advertising network in Western Montana
Read the FAQ about NewWest.Net here.
For contact information, head over to our "contact us" page.
Now a little more detail:
New West.Net is a nationally-award-winning, online network covering and connecting the fastest-growing region in the country with a refreshing mix of daily news, original reportage, commentary, photography, video, music and conversation. NewWest.Net includes a regional Front Page, and local sites in eight communities around the region; find your local site by clicking the "New West Local Sites" pull-down menu on the top left of any page. NewWest.Net also features topic-specific pages that you can find by clicking relevant links on the left-hand navigation bar. NewWest.Net publishes 10-15 new stories a day, so check back often. You can also sign up for daily, weekly, or city-specific email newsletters by clicking here, and you can sign up for one of our many RSS feeds by clicking here.
New West Publishing also produces conferences and other live events. Our annual Real Estate and Development in the Rocky Mountain West conference is held each fall in Missoula. In 2008, it will be October 25 and 26 at the Hilton Garden Inn. The Designing the New West: Architecture and Landscape in the Mountain West conference is held each spring. For more information on both events go to www.newwest.net/conferences.
Other company businesses include New West Indoor, which offers local display advertising in Western Montana, and New West Editorial Services, which offers a wide range of content and publishing services to other publishers. New West Events features local, interactive event calendars in eight cities around the region.
There are a number of ways you can participate at NewWest.Net. Anyone is free to share their thoughts on any story via the "comment" button at the bottom of every story. Register with New West (it's free) and you can make your ideas and opinions heard through our "Unfiltered" section. If you have a guest column you'd like to submit for consideration, contact Editor in Chief Courtney Lowery at .
If you're interested in submitting freelance work to New West, click here for our writers' guidelines.
NewWest.Net offers unpaid internships with each of our local sites and with headquarters in Missoula. The deadline for Spring internships is Nov. 1. The deadline for Summer internships is April 15 and the deadline for Fall internships is July 1. If you're interested, send a cover letter, resume and 5-7 clips to Editor in Chief Courtney Lowery (). Electronic portfolios are preferred, but you can also send via mail to P.O. Box 9107, Missoula, MT, 59807.
NOW A BIT ABOUT THE NEW WEST TEAM:
NewWest.Net is made up of a community of writers and editors spread out across the Rockies. Here is the core staff at our retreat last summer. Below you'll find a list of the people who run this company.
Jonathan Weber, Founder, Publisher and CEO
Jonathan was the co-founder and editor in chief of The Industry Standard, a weekly business news magazine and online service that rocketed to prominence in the late 1990s only to crash and burn along with the rest of the dot-com economy in 2001. He had long had ties to Montana - his first job out of college was waiting tables at Chico Hot Springs - and moved to Missoula in early 2002 to serve as a visiting professor at the University of Montana Journalism School. He quickly became fascinated by the myriad issues associated with growth and change in the region, but was also frustrated by the lack of media devoted to those issues. He began to think about how the dramatic changes underway in the media world might create an opportunity for a new kind of publication about the Rocky Mountain region, and the result was New West. Jonathan has also served eight years as a writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times, and was a co-founder of the Geneva-based international affairs publication World Link.
Reach Jonathan at jonathan@newwest.net
Courtney Lowery, Editor in Chief
Courtney is a former Lee Newspapers and Associated Press writer and editor who has spent much of her writing career covering politics, the Western landscape and all issues in which the two intersect. As a farm kid in Central Montana, Courtney saw early on the power journalism could have in connecting people (even those isolated on the plains) and that is what drove her to journalism in her teens and continues to keep her in the business now.
Courtney also teaches the Rural News Network class at the University of Montana, a project she founded in 2006 that aims to connect UM students with rural Montana and help small towns revive their newspapers online. The first town site in the Rural News Network was born in Courtney's hometown: The Dutton Country Courier.
Reach Courtney at
Colin Hickey, Events Editor
Colin is an air force brat born in Fort Worth Texas. By the time he made it out of High School he had lived in seven different cities in seven different states. After two years of business school at the University of Wyoming Colin uprooted and followed his older brothers to Missoula. Ever since, Colin has been involved in the local music scene. He and his band The International Playboys have toured the country ten times in the last six years. That's a total of 85,000 miles driving in a van. He's promoted more shows in Missoula than he can remember but if he were to guess, it would be about 1,500. Besides being an amazing front man he also enjoys cooking, golf, beer, Desperate Housewives (the TV show) and the occasional video game. Colin is engaged to a wonderful woman named Lexie and together they have two crazy dogs, Mia and Juan Martinez.
Reach Colin at
Molly Bradford, Director of Sales and Marketing
Molly knew early on she had a knack for selling and apparently, she wasn't the only one. When she was 8-years-old, Molly overheard a family friend ask her father, “So, when is your daughter finally going to get into sales?” It was pretty much a straight shot from there. The tugs of nature and nurture (an entrepreneurial realtor father, an enviro-conscious artist mother, and two uber-intelligent athletic older brothers) melded quite forcefully into a career in advertising & marketing in Montana. There were a few pit-stops along the way: a degree in German w/ Mathematics minor from the University of Vermont, a year abroad at the University of Salzburg, ski bumming in the Green Mountains after college, and an impromptu cross-country move to Missoula.
When she’s not out chasing leads, closing deals and concepting marketing campaigns, Molly finds herself loving on her daughter, husband, two dogs, and the great outdoors: hiking, camping, skiing and traveling. An appreciation for good books, slow-food and gardening, art and live music, and civic engagement are meditative mellowing agents to an otherwise high-energy existence. A dabbler in sprint-triathlons, Molly just completed her first Half Iron Man and is raring for more!
Most recently, after a seven year stint as the top-producer and senior advertising representative at Missoula’s weekly paper, The Independent, Molly has joined us as the Director of Sales & Marketing for NewWest.
Reach Molly at
Nate Merkt, Sales Executive
Nate was born and raised in Missoula, but left Montana for the “big city” of Minneapolis, MN more than a decade ago. In Minnapolis, he worked for American Express Financial for eight years before deciding the corporate world was not for him. Seeking smaller, more interesting companies with which to spend his time, Nate moved to Portland, Maine and then to Bellingham, Washington, where he mostly worked as a consultant.
When he returned to Montana, he found NewWest.Net -- the perfect way to help re-engage in the community. Every spare moment he's able to find is spent moment trail running, fishing and enjoying the Montana he loves.
Reach Nate at
Bill Schneider, Travel & Outdoors Editor
Bill Schneider has spent 35 years hiking, fishing, bicycling, hunting, and skiing throughout the Rocky Mountain region, but still hasn’t had enough of it. During college in the mid-1960s, he worked on a trail crew in Glacier National Park and became a hiking addict. He spent the 1970s publishing the Montana Outdoors magazine for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks and freelancing for outdoor magazines. In 1979, Bill co-founded Falcon Publishing. As a longtime freelance writer, Bill has written twenty books and many magazine articles on wildlife, outdoor recreation, and environmental issues. For twelve years, he also taught classes on bicycling, backpacking, zero-impact camping, and hiking in bear country for the Yellowstone Institute, a nonprofit educational organization in Yellowstone National Park. Since the early 1980s, he has been helping people train for their first marathon with his “Anybody Can Run a Marathon: clinic. In 2000, Bill retired from his position as president of Falcon Publishing (now part of The Globe Pequot Press) after it had grown into the premier publisher of outdoor recreation guidebooks, now with nearly 1,000 titles in print. He currently lives in Helena, Montana and works as a publishing consultant and freelance writer.
Reach Bill at
Richard Martin, Senior Writer, Colorado
Richard has written for Wired, Time, The Atlantic and The Asian Wall Street Journal, not to mention National Fisherman and Inside Triathlon. Since graduating from Yale he’s lived in Paris, Hong Kong, Los Angeles (twice), Washington D.C., Austin, San Antonio, Seattle and San Rafael, California, which pretty much explains why he settled in Boulder three years ago with his wife Shawna and five-year-old son Walker.
“For years every time my life turned upside down I would drive cross-country and stop over in Boulder, where I had friends from high school," Richard says. “So actually stopping and finding a place to live here saved me about 1500 miles of driving. I see New West as a unifying voice for the most dynamic and iconoclastic place left in an increasingly homogenized America."
Reach Richard at rmartin@newwest.net
Jill Kuraitis, Boise Publisher
Jill grew up on California's central coast in a family that pretended to camp and hike but were better at rescuing baby birds and rehabbing earthworms. She’s old enough to have ridden a horse to school and tied him to the fence, and to have seen the Grateful Dead the first time around. A University of California, Santa Barbara graduate in theatre management, she worked in the movie and TV industry before moving to Boise 20 years ago with her husband, toddler son and daughter in utero. Convinced that Boise is the best place to live in the known universe, she’s been writing ever since for advertising and public relations, political, and alternative-press clients. She’s raised two fine children who refuse to live anywhere but the West, gardens haphazardly but successfully, and volunteers in community and environmental causes. Jill founded and runs a group of western quilters who refuse to follow rules or attend committee meetings. They have a secret handshake and stupid hats.
Reach Jill at jill@newwest.net
Jenny Shank, Books & Writers Editor
Jenny Shank grew up in Denver and left Colorado only long enough to earn her B.A. from the University of Notre Dame. Although her skills as a crack book report writer set off a bidding war among potential employers, she opted to stay in school long enough to earn an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado. She served as the Denver/Boulder A.V. Club Editor of The Onion from 2000 until the 2006 birth of her daughter, and her book reviews appear in the Rocky Mountain News and the Daily Camera. She’s a Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction writer whose work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, CutBank, Weber Studies, Bust, Image, Calyx, Eureka Literary Magazine, Sport Literate, and other publications, and one of her stories was listed among the “Notable Essays of the Year" in the Best American Essays. Her novel-in-progress was a recent semi-finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. She lives in Boulder with her husband and daughter.
Reach Jenny at
David Frey, Western Slope Contributor
A native of Pennsylvania, David Frey came to Colorado in 1993 as an intern at High Country News in Paonia and decided he would never leave the Rockies. Then he changed his mind - but only for a while. After two years with the Associated Press in Nashville, Tenn., he bounced back to the Roaring Fork Valley. He has written for newspapers, magazines, the wire and the Web. His work has appeared in the Denver Post, the Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, the Aspen Daily News and the Snowmass Sun, among other publications. He freelances out of Carbondale, where Mount Sopris watches over his shoulder as he types. He and his wife Janet have two cats, two dogs and two horses. The ark is on the way.
Reach David at
