Washington journalist, AP transportation writer
WASHINGTON — Joan Lowy, a veteran Washington journalist who spent the final decade of her career covering transportation issues for The Associated Press, has died. She was 66.
Ms. Lowy died early Wednesday at her home in Vienna, Virginia, after a 10-year battle with abdominal cancer, said her husband, Michael Christensen.
“She was a heck of a reporter,” Christensen, also a journalist, said Thursday about his wife of 33 years. “She loved journalism. She loved the give-and-take and everything.”
AP colleagues described Ms. Lowy as a gifted newshound who taught them without knowing it.
“Joan was a reporter’s reporter: whip smart, an expert on her beat and someone who genuinely loved being in the middle of the news,” said Julie Pace, a senior vice president and executive editor, who worked with Lowy in Washington. “It was so fun watching her dig in on a big story and I, and countless others, learned so much from working alongside her.”
Ken Guggenheim, who was Ms. Lowy’s editor before she went on leave in 2018 to focus on her illness, said she was smart, dogged and no-nonsense.
Ms. Lowy joined the AP’s Washington bureau in 2006 and moved to the transportation beat in 2008. She was diagnosed with cancer in 2012.
“She was passionate about transportation issues, recognizing how the fine print in dense bureaucratic documents could have life-or-death implications for American drivers, passengers and pedestrians,” Guggenheim said. “She developed a vast network of sources because all sides in the world of transportation recognized that she was fair and meticulous — and impossible to spin or deceive.”
A New Jersey native and graduate of George Washington University, Lowy had been a reporter for now-closed The Rocky Mountain News in Denver and a Washington correspondent for the now-defunct Scripps Howard News Service, for whom she covered the 1991 Gulf War, among other assignments.