Paul Brown
Newscaster/Reporter
As a newscaster/reporter for NPR in Washington, Paul Brown handles an ever-changing combination of on-air, reporting, editing, producing, and directing duties. He brings over twenty years of radio and newspaper experience to NPR.
From 2001 to 2003 Brown was NPR's executive producer for weekend programming. He also served as acting executive producer and acting senior producer of NPR's Talk of the Nation, and as acting senior producer at NPR's Morning Edition.
Before joining NPR fulltime in 2001, Brown was a freelance reporter, radio producer, and music producer based in the South. Prior to that, he spent nearly 13 years at NPR member station WFDD in Winston-Salem, NC, as production manager, news director, and program director. He filed reports regularly for NPR, most often for NPR's cultural desk. He also produced and hosted a popular Southern culture and music program, Across the Blue Ridge, and won an AP Enterprise Reporting award for his coverage of the changing lives of tobacco factory workers at R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.
Earlier in the 1980s, Brown was part owner and editor of a weekly newspaper in North Carolina, and worked at historic mountain-music radio station WPAQ in Mount Airy, NC. He attended Oberlin College, trained in photography at Penland School, and trained and worked as a custom upholsterer.
A musician on banjo, piano, guitar, and fiddle since childhood, Brown spent years collecting and documenting traditional music in southwestern Virginia and northwest North Carolina; he studied banjo with the late Tommy Jarrell under an NEA Folk Arts Apprenticeship Grant. He has produced and performed on numerous CDs and LPs for the County, Smithsonian Folkways, Heritage, and Rounder labels. He won a National Federation of Community Broadcasters Silver Reel Award for his NPR music documentary "Breaking Up Christmas: A Blue Ridge Mountain Holiday."
In 2000, he was the sound recording engineer for the Preserving Living Traditions project in Tibet, materials from which are now in the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library at the University of Virginia. In 2003, he was executive editor and presenter of the series Honky Tonks, Hymns & the Blues on NPR's Morning Edition.
