Wednesday, January 21, 2004
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Wednesday, January 21, 2004 |
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New host of public radio’s ‘Marketplace’ remembers childhood in Fayetteville By MICHAEL BOYLAN Former Fayetteville resident and Woodward Academy graduate David Brown now addresses 7 million people around the world each week as the host of “Marketplace,” the most listened to business news broadcast in America. Listeners to the public radio show may have recently heard Brown discuss returning to his hometown during the holidays and barely recognizing it. “I left Fayetteville in 1984 and return usually twice a year to visit family,” said Brown on-air. “Growing up, we’d get a new gas station every year and it was big news. Now, I hear from my mom about all the new stores arriving and how it is getting bigger and better, but I think when the Shoney’s becomes a Hooters, you’ve jumped the shark.” Brown still considers Fayetteville home and stated that he never felt more Southern than when he moved away. One of his most vivid memories of Fayetteville is the county’s sesquicentennial celebration. That event, along with the book, “The History of Fayette County,” which still occupies a cherished place on his bookshelf and gets looked at several times a year, gave him a love of history that has fueled his career. Brown attended college at Georgia State University, where he got his journalism degree. He played in a local rock and roll band, High Voltage. The group had built up a solid regional following and toured what Brown calls the “Chitling Circuit,” which took the group all over the Southeast, playing a mixture of some original songs and southern rock covers. Brown also began working at local radio stations, including WZAL AM 1430 in McDonough and then WLTA. At WLTA, Brown was the news department and this paved the way for jobs at WCNN in 1983, as the morning program editor, Fox97 and then the Georgia Network. One incident in Georgia shaped the way that Brown would view news stories for the rest of his career. “I was covering the construction of the Jimmy Carter Highway [in Atlanta] and had conducted all of the interviews that I needed to write my story,” Brown recalled. “A homeless man asked if he could state his opinion on the project and I told him no. How much would it have taken for me to listen to the guy? I didn’t even need to turn on the tape recorder. I realized that I was being self-involved and I’ve never forgotten it. I did my story and it was nothing special, but if I had listened to the guy, it may have made it a better story. It may not have, but sometimes it is important to let people say what’s on their mind.” After leaving Georgia, Brown headed north to Boston, Mass., and began working for Monitor Radio on their international news program. The job took him all over the world, including stops in Washington D.C., London, England and Los Angeles. Eventually, Brown said, the cold winters in Boston forced him to move, and when Monitor Radio asked if there was any way he would stay on, he responded by jokingly telling them to build a studio in his apartment in L.A. They did and Brown began doing the program from across the country. He would wake up at 3 a.m. and start planning the show and doing interviews, preparing for a show that would air at noon on the East coast. Soon, Brown would go to law school at Washington and Lee University. “Marketplace” was already actively recruiting him to work on the show but Brown would graduate with his law degree before accepting the job of senior producer, which Brown likened to being the author of the show, in 2000. This fall, long-time host David Brancaccio left his position, and Brown was asked to step in as anchor. “Marketplace is one of the best jobs a journalist could hope for,” said Brown. “We’re encouraged to take risks and it is OK to crash. It is the biggest business show in America, but it is not a business person’s business show.” The show is often fun and irreverent as it asks and finds answers to these questions. Brown finds there is a new challenge everyday. So far, the biggest challenge for Brown is giving up “authorship” of the show and living up to former host Brancaccio, who built up a large and adoring audience. Some people aren’t aware that Brancaccio even left. Brown received a letter from one woman who dressed him down for forsaking his Italian roots and for changing his name to Brown from Brancaccio. His day starts at 7:30 a.m. with Brown looking at the wires and preparing for a meeting at 8:15. By the time the meeting breaks up, usually at 9 a.m., the skeleton for the show has been created and everyone starts writing and conducting their interviews. Crunch time for the show is between noon and 2 p.m. Reporters around the world are filing their stories and Brown and the senior producer are writing the intros to the pieces. The editing of the show is done by 1:30 p.m. and by 2 p.m. Pacific Time (5 p.m. Eastern), the first broadcast is on the air. From 2:30-3 p.m., they do fixes and the next feed, which is the one listeners in Georgia receive, is free of any blunders. “It can be frenetic, but it’s fun,” said Brown. Brown said that 2003 was the year of the big cleanup and that 2004 will be the year of recovery, sensing that many people are feeling a sense of relief, with the dot-com bust and the financial scandals behind us. The election will be a big issue, Brown said, and he will be looking at how the deficit affects things, wondering how it will affect the value of the dollar and if there is a possibility of seeing inflation in an election year. He also ponders what would happen if interest rates, which have been very low, went up. Regionally, Brown wonders how much more sprawl Atlanta can sustain. He sees it every time he returns home to visit his parents. He acknowledges that the days of attending the local premiere of “Smokey and the Bandit” at the Fayetteville cinema behind the Dairy Queen happened in a place that doesn’t exist anymore. “The only time I saw a mob scene like that,” said Brown of the screening of “Smokey and the Bandit,” which was filmed in the area, was when the courthouse was on fire in the spring of 1982. Brown resides in Los Angeles and spends a lot of time with longtime partner Emily Donahue in Austin, Texas, but Fayetteville, he says, is never far from his thoughts or heart and will always be home.
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