Jesse Brown (journalist)
| Jesse Brown | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Jesse Benjamin Brown Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Residence | Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Occupation | Journalist, tech entrepreneur |
Jesse Benjamin Brown is a Canadian journalist as well as media and tech entrepreneur. His journalistic activity is mostly channeled through Canadaland, a podcast he started in autumn 2013 that has by late 2014 expanded into a crowdfunded news site.
Brown is best known for his October 2014 investigative reports, published by the Toronto Star, that focus on various women who claimed to have endured non-consensual violent conduct and workplace sexual harassment from the well-known Canadian radio and television personality Jian Ghomeshi.
Born to a Canadian Jewish family and raised in Toronto, Brown attended Northern Secondary School. He got his first experience with the media at the age of sixteen, interning at local radio station Q107's promotions department through his high school's co-op program.
At seventeen, inspired by punk zines and "too many" viewings of Pump Up the Volume, Brown started Punch, an underground student newspaper that raised a commotion by running a piece evaluating the school's teachers based on a survey of hundred students Brown interviewed. He ended up getting disciplined by the school's principal while the entire episode raised enough controversy to be featured on Metro Morning, a CBLA-FM radio programme then-hosted by Andy Barrie, where young Brown got invited to give his side of the story. Based on the publicity it received via the controversy, the paper expanded to become a Toronto-wide underground project that ran for a few years.
During mid-to-late 1990s, Brown moved to Montreal in order to attend McGill University. Outside of classes, he freelanced for various outlets including Vice, a magazine that recently transformed from a government-funded Voice of Montreal community multicultural media project. He also engaged in elaborate pranks on local mainstream media organizations such as putting out a press-release from a fictitious dot-com company babytalk.com about a fictitious product, Babytalk, that "empowers Canadian infants to communicate with Japanese, Australian, and German tots" and helps them "make friends all over the world and learn valuable job skills sure to aid them in the new-economy job market". CFCF, CTV's affiliate in Montreal, shot a piece on the fake product by the non-existent company featuring a woman with her 2-year-old baby (both arranged for by Brown) that aired on the station's 6 p.m. daily newscast.
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