About the Courier

The Winfield Courier is a small online news site about Winfield, Arkansas City and the rest of Cowley County, Kansas. We write about the businesses that keep Main Street open, the people who grew up here and went on to do something worth remembering, Southwestern College and Cowley College, the Walnut Valley Festival, and the towns from Udall to Dexter that tend to get left out of regional coverage.

Some of what you will find here is new reporting. Some of it is older Courier coverage from 2009 to 2016 that we have brought back at its original address and original date, so links from that era still lead somewhere useful. Where an older story could not be recovered in full, we have written a fresh piece on the same subject and said so.

Who writes it

Loretta Vance, editor. Loretta assigns and edits every story, handles corrections and decides what runs. Questions about anything on the site end up with her.

Garrett Pruitt covers business, agriculture and the county’s industrial base, from Strother Field to the grain elevators.

Jolene Marquardt writes most of our In Profile pieces and covers the arts, the festival and local history.

Wade Ellison covers schools, the two colleges and sports.

How we work

We stick to what can be checked. Facts in our profiles and history pieces come from public records, published sources and the people involved, and we do not make up quotes or details to fill a gap. When we get something wrong we fix it and add a note at the bottom of the story saying what changed. See our editorial standards for the details.

The Courier is independent. It has no connection to any printed newspaper that has used the Courier name in Winfield, and nobody pays to appear in our news coverage.