Rio Rancho media entrepreneur David Brown has steadfastly remained an SPJ member for half a century.
Brown, who helped rebirth the long-dismantled SPJ Rio Grande Chapter and is currently a board member, grew up with SPJ. His father, an entomologist at Purdue University, edited an agriculture magazine and was given a lifetime SPJ membership. As he was growing up Brown often picked up and read Quill magazine. “That got me into journalism in part,” Brown said. “It never was an option for me to drop my membership, even though I wasn’t in hard news for awhile.”
Brown, 70, made a career as a stock photographer and editor, running his own company for years. It was a job that took him and his wife Patricia around the world.
His career began though at the University of Missouri in Columbia where he majored in magazine journalism. Between his junior and senior year, he had an opportunity for an internship at The Brookfield Daily News Bulletin. “The editor had not taken a vacation for 7 years,” Brown said. “They decided to hire someone, which turned out to be me, as a summer intern, while he took the entire summer off.”
At 19, Brown was suddenly editor of the small town daily newspaper. It was the day of Linotype machines and old-fashioned flatbed presses. “The presses printed by going clunk, clunk, clunk. I’ll never forget that sound,” he said.
He worked as a beat reporter and columnist for the Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune and a field reporter for the Missouri Farmer magazine before landing a job as writer and editor for the International Harvester Company in Chicago. He traveled all over the country for the organization, developing his photography and writing skills.
Brown eventually went off on his own as a freelancer and became a stringer for McGraw-Hill Companies and other clients, covering the 1968 Democratic Convention and other stories.
He launched Dave Brown and Associates, an editorial services business based in Chicago. After two successful decades, “the economy went all to heck and I wanted a break so I let it all go,” he said.
Brown reinvented himself again and became a landscape photographer after moving to Prescott, Ariz. He handled stock photography for more than a dozen agencies, traveling to Europe, China, Australia and New Zealand. In the mid 90’s he spent much of three years traveling in Europe in a motor home and taking pictures.
The couple moved to New Mexico eight years ago, and Brown downsized, buying a small company. He pursued writing, and has self-published several books. A nonfiction work, Dead End Path: How Industrial Agriculture has Stolen our Future, is based on extensive research and his years working for big ag. He also has a techno thriller fiction work out, Quantum Cowboy and the sci-fi book Promise of the Phoenix.
Brown’s life changed again in June, when Patricia, his wife of 49 years, passed away.
Journalism has gone through major shifts too since he began his career. “I’ve seen a lot of the change and frankly most of it is for the worst,” he said.
He thinks reporters are less objective and too often have become part of the news themselves. Computers, Internet and now social media are taking news in a whole new direction.
“It is hard to know how it’s going to turn out, but the old traditional journalism is dying, slowly,” Brown said. “Old shoe-leather journalism is at risk. Reporters don’t have time or support to dig into things. Now it’s kind of space-filling fluff.”
Profile by Staci Matlock
