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CAPE FEAR MEMORIAL BRIDGE CLOSURE: UPDATES, RESOURCES, AND CONTEXT

Paul Brown: "I Still Miss the Newsroom"

Paul Brown is still crafting stories.  At this stage, they’re not the sound-rich news features or the news-of-the-world casts from his days at NPR in Washington, D.C. 

Old Time Music is now his medium.  It’s a genre that draws from a patchwork of mountain music, gospel, bluegrass – even fiddle tunes for square-dancing. 

In this first interview installment, which was recorded in between Brown's music gigs during a stop in New Orleans, he explores life after the deadline-driven newsroom and why he chose to let go of anchoring the most-listened-to morning newscast in the United States.  

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RLH:  And you took a voluntary buyout from NPR in December of last year.  Why did you decide to do that?

PB:  The voluntary buyout offer that NPR made to all of its employees to help balance its budget came along just as I was emerging from a pretty major heart surgery – from which I’ve largely recovered, by the way.  I felt at the time that the stress of a daily newsroom operation in which one deadline immediately followed another – I was working in hourly news at the time – was probably not the best thing for me as I was recovering from the surgery.  So it was a fortuitous moment is all I can say – the scheduling of the buyout. 

RLH:  Just during that first month or two of being away, did you have to go through any sort of mourning period?  Were you playing more music?  Were you sleeping late?  Eating more?  Drinking more?  What was that like?

PB:  I would say that’s ongoing.  I think the first month or two I was really heavily into recovery from the surgery.  But, um…

I still miss the newsroom.

And I’m not through this period of adjusting to a new life.  I really loved that work.  It was possibly the greatest privilege of my life – working at NPR.  And reaching a large audience, working to extraordinarily high standards, under rigorous time pressure, and ultimately becoming the top-of-the-hour morning news anchor.  So, it was a tremendous experience and also an equally tremendous responsibility to carry that off – day after day, hour after hour. 

And you can imagine, with a job that intense, when you leave it, if you really love it as much as I did, you really miss it. 

RLH:  Now that you’ve been out of the newsroom for almost a year, has your perspective on the work itself, on journalism, shifted at all?

PB:  That’s a really tough question and a good question. 

If my perspective has changed, it’s only changed in the sense that I feel there’s a plenty big challenge still remaining for journalists.  I think we fall short a lot in helping people understand the world in a fairly dispassionate way and also in presenting more than just the events of the day and the negative events of the day that capture all of our attention. 

I think, for example, that news in the arts is every bit as important as news of the latest development in a war or the latest development in economics.  The reason that I say that is that I personally believe that art, which is a representation of ideas, there are a lot of definitions – you can look them up in the dictionary – that art is – or at least can be -- the highest expression of the human spirit.

We get caught up in the events of the day.  We don’t always provide adequate context.  And I think that we should try harder as journalists to do that. 

RLH:  Paul, thank you so much for taking the time.

PB:  My pleasure.

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Paul Brown will perform at Thalian Hall on November 8th at the screening of the documentary Broadcast: A Man and his Dream.  

For more information on the event, click on the link above or visit:

www.thalianhall.org.

Listen for Part 2 of the Paul Brown interview next week -- to hear more about his music – and why he sees power in every life story.   

Rachel hosts and produces CoastLine, an award-winning hourlong conversation featuring artists, humanitarians, scholars, and innovators in North Carolina. The show airs Wednesdays at noon and Sundays at 4 pm on 91.3 FM WHQR Public Media. It's also available as a podcast; just search CoastLine WHQR. You can reach her at rachellh@whqr.org.