Two veteran journalists have joined the Ventura County Star’s staff.
Chris Bowman stepped in as the paper’s managing editor on March 15. He will help oversee overall newsroom operations and work with reporters on investigative stories and in-depth pieces.
Wes Woods II is the new West County reporter. He will cover Ventura, Ojai, Santa Paula, Fillmore and Piru.
Bowman, 66, has more than 30 years experience reporting at daily newspapers, including 24 years as environment reporter for the Sacramento Bee.
He has earned numerous awards and honors, including being the first U.S. journalist appointed by Harvard University as an Environmental Nieman Fellow, which provided a year of study with experts in various fields. Bowman also was part of a Sacramento Bee team that won a Wallace Stegner Award for environmental coverage of the American West and spent four months training journalists in Zimbabwe as a Sen. J. John Heinz III fellow in international environmental reporting.
“I’ve always had a public service calling,” Bowman said, one that goes back to his days as editor of his Bay Area high school newspaper. He came of age during the Watergate era and started his professional career soon after, in the late 1970s.
Bowman’s early life involved a dozen moves around the country. He was born in Minnesota, but didn’t stay long. His father, a World War II naval aviator, continued in the aviation business selling small aircraft, primarily Cessna planes.
One of those moves, from Cessna’s Kansas headquarters to Billings, Montana, sparked a lifelong love of fly fishing. Bowman, then 11, said he cried at his first sight of a clear-running trout stream. Neighborhood kids taught him to tie his own flies. He picked up a bamboo rod at a drug store.
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He’d taken a safe hunting course and was about to get a shotgun when the family moved to the Bay Area community of San Mateo. That California arrival, at age 12, lasted through his high school years and beyond.
As a teen, Bowman took photos of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill from his dad’s Cessna.
Bowman earned a bachelor’s degree in history from UC Davis and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University, starting his career as a reporter for the Press-Enterprise in Riverside in 1978. He covered state government at the Hartford Courant for two years, then worked at The Bee from 1985 to 2009, ending as senior environment reporter.
At that point — amid industry convulsions that sharply cut newspaper staff during the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession — he switched to speechwriting, communications and editing.
“The fact is, I never really left journalism,” Bowman said. “Journalism left me, as it did for so may other reporters.” He was among the dozens of Bee employees laid off “in one fell swoop” in 2009 at the peak of the recession.
He had always looked for an opportunity to return. His initial calling kept ringing louder, he said, “especially in the past four years, when we had government leaders at the highest level label journalists “public enemy No. 1.”
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Ventura County will be a new area for Bowman, though his wife, Linda Ackley, an environment and water attorney, was a reporter in the early 1980’s at Ventura’s KVEN, then an all-news station.
“I love the mountains. She loves the ocean,” Bowman said. “Here we have both, side by side.”
Woods, 44, the West County reporter, started Monday. His professional career started with an internship at the Desert Sun in Palm Springs, now the Star’s sister publication, and includes stints at the Press-Enterprise in Riverside, the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin in Rancho Cucamonga, the Los Angeles Daily News and the Outlook Newspaper in La Cañada Flintridge.
He has covered government agencies, infrastructure and public safety and won awards from the California News Publishers Association for investigative and in-depth reporting.
Woods also has extensive experience as an entertainment reporter, including leading coverage of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival for the Inland Valley paper. His love of music, especially hip-hop, goes back to his youth.
“In high school, it really spoke to me,” Woods said of the genre.
The native of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho — who spent his entire young life in the same house — said the rock music played on the radio didn’t resonate with him. His passion for hip-hop brought him to California, when his best friend encouraged Woods to join him at the college paper, Cal State’s Daily 49er.
Snoop (Dogg, the rapper) was from Long Beach, the friend reminded him. Woods earned his bachelor’s degree at the Long Beach university and, through covering music festivals, broadened his taste to many other genres.
Though his byline might be new to readers, Woods has a long, strong connection to the Star. His wife, Wendy Leung, previously covered education and Oxnard at the Star for nine years before she recently left to work for the Center for Biological Diversity.
Woods said he’s looking forward to covering the west county.
“I’m really excited about it,” he said.
Gretchen Wenner covers breaking news for the Ventura County Star. Reach her at gretchen.wenner@vcstar.com or 805-437-0270.
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