Chuck Nowlen joined Woodbury News Net in August, 2025 with deep experience as a reporter and editor, having worked in local news in communities across the U.S.

He began 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.

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. 

He then became managing editor at Madison Magazine, where he won State Bar of Wisconsin “Gavel” awards for two investigative pieces – one on federal drug-seizure policies and another 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.

Since then, Nowlen has worked as a freelance journalist in the east metro and is in the process of writing a book.