When the Roundabout’s new editor was a kid, he was always skipping school to make magazines.
Chuck Nowlen’s first mag debuted when he was a 2nd Grader in Rockford, IL: a four-page homage to the 1960s cartoon show, “Quick Draw McGraw.”
It earned him the ultimate – a sneak-attack kiss from classmate Betsy Tessman across the aisle.
A couple years later, there was a 12-page take-off on the satirical classic, Mad Magazine, with a 50-copy mimeograph press run in his elementary school’s office.
Nowlen wrote all the stories and drew all the pictures, and it sold for a dime on the playground.
After the one-kid sales staff and the office manager were paid off, he netted a grand total of $1.93.
He knew then and there that his professional life would always be something between rapture and obscene riches.
“Hey, I’m a journalist. I can’t seem to help it,” Nowlen said last week, his third week on the job at the Roundabout. “Good thing it’s the best freaking job in the world.”
Nowlen sold his first magazine article – on the isolation unit at what was then the nation’s highest-security prison – to The Progressive while still an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He cut his professional teeth as a general assignment daily reporter in the Milwaukee Sentinel’s state capital bureau, covering everything from the state Legislature and campus labor strikes to agriculture and public safety. In the mid-1990s, The Sentinel and the Milwaukee Journal merged to become The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Nowlen also has been a crime reporter and assistant city editor at Madison’s onetime afternoon daily, The Capital Times, where he set the paper’s all-time, one-year byline record in 1998 and became the only unanimous choice for its reporter-of-the-year “Allegretti Award” in early 1999.
The paper has since become weekly, digital-first, and known officially as The Cap Times.
Nowlen went to Northwestern University’s Medill Graduate School of Journalism in 1988 but left early to become a UW-Madison public information specialist under the media-intensive chancellorship of former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna E. Shalala.
He then became managing editor at Madison Magazine, where he won State Bar of Wisconsin “Gavel” awards for two investigative pieces – one in 1992 on federal drug-seizure policies and another in 1997 on racial inequities in Dane County jury pools. The latter was written independently for Madison’s alternative weekly, Isthmus.
In late 2000, Nowlen moved to the top editor’s chair at Las Vegas Weekly, which went on to win the Western Publications Association 2001“Maggie” Award as Best Consumer Tabloid. The paper also claimed 25 Nevada Press Association awards that year, including Best Large Weekly Newspaper and Nowlen’s individual honor for Best Editorial.
Digging hard into digital-media techniques, start-up business planning and newsroom-management consulting, he created CAN2 Media in 2006, boosted by the University of Minnesota’s Part-Time MBA Program and St. Paul College’s Web Design and Development Program.
From 2014 to mid-2016, Nowlen covered business, schools, townships, and general assignments for The Hudson Star Observer, earning a 2015 Best Business Coverage award from the Wisconsin Newspaper Association, and a 2016 honor in the Best Feature category.
Meanwhile, one of the highest and most profound points in Nowlen’s career was inspired by his longtime girlfriend Jeanne, an Edina native who was a K-12 teacher, administrator, and mentor for four decades at Minneapolis Public Schools.
Jeanne talked him into substitute teaching in St. Paul, which culminated in an eight-month 2024 assignment as a teaching paraprofessional for six astoundingly memorable autistic 3rd -, 4th- , and 5th-graders at Eastern Heights Elementary School near Woodbury.
“I wish I could name them for you because I will absolutely never forget any of their faces, their personalities, the way they connected – and, above all, their incredible, incredible gifts,” Nowlen explained. “I’ll never think of the word, ‘normal’ the same way again.”
He never thought about skipping a day, either. Not once. Not even for a minute.
Nowlen is also a near workout addict with karate, jogging, weights, core training, and basketball. He lives with two super-cats in downtown St. Paul.
