In 2005, Matt Brown wasn’t a journalist, but that didn’t stop him from calling up the big three news agencies—Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse—and telling them he was.
“Yup, fake it ‘til you make it,” he says, summing up how he was able to land freelance assignments, which propelled him on to a dream career in journalism, including a stint as a foreign correspondent for a major daily.
Brown, 33 years old and a former Peace Corps worker in Guinea, has been published in major news outlets worldwide, including The New York Times, Time magazine and the BBC. He’s seen gunfire, dead bodies and burned villages while covering wars. He’s reported on negotiations between dictators, documented court appearances by celebrities and covered speeches delivered by two sitting U.S. presidents. He even once lobbied a news bureau to follow his source, which led a Time editor to shell out for a helicopter rental to fly a reporter into a hurricane-swept area of rural Mexico.
His résumé is impressive, though, oddly, he’s never really needed one. His clips, confidence and a key recommendation by a mentor have each served as stepping stones during his career, which he recounts one recent Sunday evening over Thai food in a restaurant near his apartment in Washington, D.C.
It’s a journey that started with editors denying him journalism jobs, which led him to simply start telling editors that he was a journalist in order to obtain freelance assignments. That move, along with his lobbying, propelled him to cover a war zone in Africa while researching a graduate school project. Then a job back in a small California town covering city council prepared him to go back to Africa as a top foreign correspondent for three years.
Now working in public relations, Brown has just come back from Sudan, where he served as a guide for George Clooney, the third such trip he has arranged and led for the Oscar-winning actor for the Enough Project. The non-profit organization promotes human rights in Africa and uses celebrities to promote their messages.
How does one start?
Brown majored in English at USIU in San Diego but couldn’t get a job in journalism, despite having served as the editor of the university’s student newspaper and getting a few clips published in online travel magazines. “How does one start?” he thought. He decided the lack of a master’s degree was standing in his way.
It was in his second semester at grad school at San José State University that a text about news agencies prompted him to research nearby bureaus. He learned the big three had bureaus north in San Francisco, but not in the South Bay—the Silicon Valley and, in many ways, the technology capital of the world. Time magazine only had one correspondent on the west coast, in Los Angeles, he says.
Brown called up each of them, saying, “‘I’m a journalist, I’m based in San José and I want to get on your stringer roster so that if you need any coverage in San José or Silicon Valley, just call me and I’ll get it done.’”
“I wasn’t a journalist,” he recalls. But he believed he could be.
Assignments trickle in
Within a month, he had callbacks from AFP, Reuters and Time magazine. His first assignment was for AFP, who asked him to cover the launch of the latest iPhone, the first one featuring video. Knowing nothing about technology, he said, “Sure, yea, I follow Apple. I’ll do it.”
He researched Apple and Steve Jobs and interviewed several analysts. By the time he went to the event, he was an expert and had most of the story written, only needing to plug in quotes and color from Jobs’ presentation.
One snag though: He only took his notebook and recorder. In the press pool he noticed other journalists typing and filing their stories right there. “I hadn’t realized how timely it had to be,” he said. Reuters and AP had already posted stories by the time he got back to his desk. Still, that first assignment established him as a writer.
A few weeks later, Reuters called and asked him to cover the unveiling of the statue of the two 1968 Olympic athletes who raised their black-gloved fists in the now iconic Black Power salute on the podium in Mexico City. Both athletes were former San José State students, and the statue's unveiling was on campus. Brown, however, was more than 100 miles away, having spent the weekend at his parents’ home.
“’Yea, sure, I can do it,’” he recalls telling the editor casually over the phone, as if he would only need to stroll across the quad later that morning.
“You never want to say ‘no’ to these things. You want to seem reliable,” he says.
Brown’s car flew down Highway 101 back to campus so he could quickly do some research in the library, only having a vague memory of once seeing a picture of the event. He arrived on time and even got to interview the participants following the ceremony. He had to miss class that night to file the story. He emailed his accommodating professor: “I can come to class and learn about journalism or I can go be a journalist. Which do you think is more important?"
It snowballed from there.
Time magazine called a month later and wanted an example of an immigrant who sent money back home to his family in Mexico, the practice being known as a “remittance.” His landlord helped him find the perfect profile. When the man’s family was cut off from a local Time correspondent in Mexico by destroyed roads from a recent hurricane, Brown lobbied his editor to do what it took to follow the story. A rented helicopter ride later for their correspondent and Time had the story from both sides.
Time later called up and asked him if he covered tech. “‘Yea, I do tech,’” he recalls saying, as if a deep-voiced, fifth-grade math student was confirming he could cover the stock market. “‘I’ve covered Apple,’” he told them. Luckily he didn’t have to figure out the intricacies of virus-blocking software built by a company but only profile the owner of the business. It gave him his first solo byline in Time.
“Then I just started building up clips. The more you do the more clips you have to sell yourself to the next level editor. I could say, ‘I’ve been in Time magazine, here’s my clip.’”
Not all jobs were glamorous. AP once hired Brown to sit all day in front of the Federal Courthouse in San Francisco just to see if Giants slugger Barry Bonds would show up. Another time, Dow Jones hired him to attend a speech and simply hold his cell phone up to the public address speaker for a reporter back in New York.
Still, he was on his way, becoming more widely known as a reliable stringer in the South Bay.
Africa’s pull
With the deadline for his graduate school project looming, Brown’s experience as a Peace Corps worker drew him back to Africa for an exposé on gem mining in Tanzania. One stipulation by San José State was that he had to get the project or a portion of it published. He used his contacts with AFP in Los Angeles to put him in touch with the AFP bureau in East Africa—Nairobi, Kenya.
He pitched his idea to the Nairobi bureau. They accepted. And off he went. He was in Africa for a month reporting and writing the story. Having a few days to kill after finishing his project, he kept hanging around the AFP bureau offering to help. After three days, the editor who published his story asked if he would go to Juba.
“Sure,” he recalls saying. “What’s Juba?”
Juba, it turned out, was the capital of Southern Sudan, before the country split and became South Sudan. It was 2006 and the Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony (whose notoriety increased recently with the most viral video ever) was to soon have peace talks with the Ugandan government, the first time in 20 years they were sitting down at the table. Kony was supposed to be coming out of the bush and negotiating.
AFP gave Brown a plane ticket and some spending money, and he arrived in a podunk town that had been ravaged by 20 years of war. He lived out of an NGO tent and made his way around the city, talking with the delegation of LRA, meeting with Sudanese government officials and filing a few small stories.
He then learned that the vice president of South Sudan was going to be heading out into the bush to meet the wanted war criminal Kony.
“I thought, wow, if I could get on this trip that would be such a coup,” Brown recalls. He told the veep, “Look, you’re going to want the world media to know about this. I’m one of the only journalists here, so you’re going to want me on the plane, right?”
He indeed talked his way on board the VP’s plane and camped with the delegation on the ground for six days. Kony never came, but he sent his deputy, who was also wanted by the International Criminal Court. Brown was the only person there with a camera, and his pictures of the meeting between Southern Sudan’s VP and Kony’s deputy hit the newswires. Millions of readers worldwide saw his news and pictures in top media outlets.
“It was just being at the right place at the right time, really,” he recalls.
That’s when it occurred to him: “Now I’m a journalist.”
Out of Africa, for now
On journalismjobs.com, Brown found an open position at the Lodi News-Sentinal in California. AFP clips from a war zone helped land him the job. The only problem was convincing his editor that he wasn’t above the position and wouldn’t take off after a few months.
It occurred to Brown that editors were now courting him—less than a year after he couldn't get a job in journalism.
He stayed in Lodi nearly a year and a half covering the city beat and life in the Central Valley. His first coverage of a sitting U.S. president was George W. Bush’s visit to the area.
“Anyone who wants a job in journalism should put in a year or two in a small town paper covering city hall,” Brown now advises. “Go somewhere you have to cover local government. That’s a great school—a great lesson in how to report, really. If you can cover city council, you can cover anything.”
Adventure beckons again
After once having a taste of being a foreign correspondent, Brown decided he wanted more. Networking with contacts yielded little until he got a call from a mentor he had met in Juba. Peter Eichstaedt, a longtime journalist, had traveled on the vice president’s plane with him to work on his book about Kony. Eichstaedt had been offered a job but decided against it. He recommended the organization hire Brown.
It turns out that the sheik of the Middle Eastern U.A.E. state of Abu Dhabi wanted to build the best possible newspaper. He offered big money and recruited top journalists from around the world for the new venture, called The National. For example, the business editor ended up being the former Middle East bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal.
The National’s foreign editor called Brown saying the job was his because of Eichstaedt’s recommendation. Brown accepted the position as the East Africa correspondent, moved to Kenya and worked out of his house in Nairobi filing two stories a week. And they paid him well.
He joined the East Africa Foreign Correspondent Association, which then had about 100 members from the Americas, Europe and Asia. All the biggies where there—The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Associated Press, National Public Radio, The Wall Street Journal, McClatchy, The Guardian and Times of London. Some nights he would play poker with other foreign correspondents.
For three years he served in the position for The National, covering everything he always wanted to—Somalia, Congo, Sudan, and even a speech by visiting President Barack Obama.
“I saw everything. I was a war correspondent,” he says. “Everything I always wanted to do. Check that box. Done. Did my dream job.”
For personal reasons he’s now back in the United States. His experience in Africa as a reporter for a top market newspaper helped land him the job at the Enough Project.
“It’s been an interesting journey,” he says.
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How to start your own journey:
–Do what it takes to get clips published. They are worth more than money. If you’re good, the money will come later.
–Tell people you’re a journalist. Live up to it. Be able to prove it. Market yourself as good. Believe you can do it (but be self-aware enough to know your skills and areas of needed improvement).
–Learn how to learn quickly. Journalism is as much about writing as it is instantly becoming an expert on something.
–Get out there and apply. No assignment is too small, but be sure to go for the big players, too. You’ll win them over with persistence and by offering to do stories with a servant’s attitude. Demonstrate your humble and strong confidence.
–www.journalismjobs.com
–Go where it’s less saturated with reporters so you can get more experience—either a small, rural town or an out-of-the-way country.
–Treat everyone well and give every assignment your best. You never know when someone—maybe years later—will recommend you for a much higher position. If you demonstrate that you always give 100 percent—even in a small job—you could be given more responsibility.
–Find and use mentors.
–Or go the traditional route: get your master’s degree in journalism, get hired at a small paper and apply for a bigger paper every couple of years. A few years working in the news media can open up all kinds of career opportunities in the future.
Bonus tip: While published clips likely help more than anything, still take the time to get your résumé looking great. Examine articles about résumés and make an appointment with your local community college career-counseling center to ask for a résumé expert. If you pay taxes in a county, you’re eligible to use the community college's services.
