My Life As a Columnist: Joye Brown
As the last students took their seats in the Union Auditorium Tuesday night, School of Journalism dean Howard Schneider made his way across the stage to the podium. He took his time, greeting those in attendance before introducing the “My Life As…” series’ latest guest, Newsday columnist Joye Brown. Head down, he read these words aloud: "One, two, three, four . . ." The cadence started silently as I walked alongside the last footfalls Marcelo Lucero made in life. Did he run those last steps? Stagger? Fight against falling?" Heavy stuff. In his reading of Brown’s column on the Nov. 8 murder of Marcelo Lucero in Patchogue, there was gravity in Schneider’s voice and in her prose. Gravity in the vivid imagery of drops and splashes of blood on freshly chalked pavement. And so Joye Brown walked out to applause, and one of the first things she said regarding her being a bit ill was "I’m on drugs." Ah. A sigh of comic relief. Joye Brown, as a columnist and award-winning reporter, has seen extraordinary things. And on Tuesday night, she, in this outside-the-water-cooler, even down-home way that verges on paradox, made young journalists at Stony Brook see those same extraordinary and oftentimes terrible things. And something in the back of my head went, "Lady, are you on drugs?" She began her talk by saying that, even before her growing up as a journalist, she grew up wanting to be a journalist. She, as a young girl in Washington, learned how to read because her mother "would take a paper and hand it to me and say, 'Take this paper. Anytime you see the word 'senate', I want you to circle it.'" She grew up wanting the adventure that came with being out in the world and not knowing when she would go to sleep. She became a bona-fide news junkie, and she was hooked the day her first story in high school became the kind of news story she read everyday. And so, though naturally shy, she became an adventurer in journalist’s clothing, working for the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., the Chicago Tribune, and eventually Newsday, where she has worked for 25 years. And, yes, she has seen. She’s seen the good, like the view from the Goodyear blimp. She’s seen the bad, like a young man running into an alley and killing himself. Like blood on freshly chalked pavement. And she has learned that people are not only smarter than politicians would have us believe, but are brave in the face of incredible adversity. A good reporter knows that, and knows that good reporting puts you there at a place and a time where a story is alive. She proved that she does that everyday and gave no indication that she’d have it any other way. "I thought she was very brave," said Barbara Selvin, a professor of journalism. Clearly, she doesn’t need a drug for that. |
