Situation Definition
Julie K.Brown visited Penn State on October 23rd, speaking in Schwab Auditorium on campus. Julie Brown is an investigative journalist that is notable for covering the Jeffrey Epstein case, which resulted in her winning the 2018 George Pole Award for Justice Reporting and the 2019 Sidney Award. She is also notable for covering the South Florida prison reform story, where her work has made a large impact on policies in those prison. She is born and raised outside Philadelphia, where she worked toward her scholarship to Temple University. At Temple, she received a degree in journalism, and also worked for the Philadelphia Daily News as a student. In 2000, she moved to South Florida after receiving an offer from the Miami Herald. Brown came to Penn State to speak about her experience as a journalist, and to give advice to current students on what it truly means to be a journalist and the difficulties it comes with.
Analysis
Julie Brown worked for everything in her life that she has attained thus far. When she was young, she was raised by only her mother, where she moved out of her house at 16. She worked everyday after school, trying to pay her own bills, and then got her scholarship at Temple University. Through a professor, she received a job at the Philadelphia Daily News, where she was then offered a full time position. Brown denied the offer due to her desire to attain a degree, where she reflected and said that was “probably the best choice I ever made.” She then began to work for the Philadelphia Daily News full-time after receiving her degree from Temple University. Brown says that her job there was the best job she ever had, and when she ended up moving to Miami she claimed that she always believed she would be back to Philadelphia to have a job like that again. When Brown got to Miami, her first notable story was about the prison systems in South Florida. The story was based on a tip that was sent into the Miami Herald about a man who had a mental illness, and the guards at the prison thought it would be “funny” to throw him into the shower and turn the heat up as high as it would go. The man ended up dying, due to his flesh peeling off from the heat of the water. This was when Brown realized that her journalism can do more than just help the public, but also to make changes in the works of policy, and show the truth. The more that Brown worked in the prison systems, she began to hear from women the words “Jeffrey Epstein” more than she could just settle with. This is when Brown began to take another look into this case, and was unsatisfied with any result that came out of the first discipline of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-ring case. “There were all of these puzzle pieces that were out there,” said Brown. “With the passage of time, there was this really damning story.”
Julie Brown investigated the Jeffrey Epstein case, and began to identify the anonymous women who were apart of the case. She interviewed over 60 women, all who were affected by Epstein, and four women came forward to share their identities in Julie Brown’s story on Epstein. The release of the story did not just share to the public what Epstein did, it also showed government officials that Epstein needed to go back to trial. Julie Brown claimed that the most shocking part of this entire process was that the police and the government got involved, and policy was about to change for Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein was then sent to jail for life, and Alex Acosta (prosecutor on initial Epstein case) had to resign from the Trump administration. Brown’s stories from both the Epstein case and the prison reform case did more than just informing the public of the truth, but revised public policies. In The Columbia Journalism Review, they wrote about Brown saying “this is what happens when a reporter refuses to give up on a story.”
Julie Brown teaches a lot about the importance and significance on quality journalism, and that it is more than just stories but a way to get the attention for a change in what’s happening in our world. Brown shows the importance of telling the truth, even though it requires hard work, but it is always worth it. In our class, we speak about how lying and fabrication can be found anywhere, but Brown shows us that when the truth is revealed, there is nothing that can hide it. Brown’s work helped people, and helped future victims of the South Florida prisons and future victims of Jeffrey Epstein. Brown shows that journalism is not about trying to make you think something, but instead setting an agenda for what to thing about, and what’s important.
Cjr. “Jeffrey Epstein’s Arrest Puts a Miami Herald Story Back in the Spotlight.” Columbia Journalism Review, www.cjr.org/the_media_today/jeffrey-epstein-miami-herald.php.